


The Hand-me-downers

by Vehemently



Category: Dark Angel, Supernatural
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-16
Updated: 2012-05-15
Packaged: 2017-11-05 11:23:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 52,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/405847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"No we are not going to tell him about how we almost accidentally blew up the universe. What is wrong with you!"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Haploid Walks Into a Bar

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by PMM and Cofax, with great patience.

Of all the people you can think of, you would expect the Winchester brothers to have landed on their feet after a thing like that. They always do. Nowadays, that's literal: when gasoline went scarce and credit cards went meaningless, the Impala came off the road and they remembered how to walk. Sam is still trying to convince his brother that one of those newfangled fuel cells will fit under the hood just fine, and Dean is still patiently explaining that there are some things you don't compromise on. They don't even have to make the arguments any more: just a look or an acorn flicked at an unwary head invokes the years of breath they've already wasted.

Dean knows a guy who knows a guy, so they rode to Seattle inside the freight train instead of on top of it. He sat cramped on the dusty steel floor, back to a plastic-wrapped pallet, and listened to restless feet above their heads through the wee hours, the thump of a heel at least proof that nobody had fallen off in the night. And then when they arrived, while the scrawny kids tossed garbage bags full of all their worldly goods down into the cinders by the side of the tracks, the Winchester brothers got off the train and walked. It's what they do. They're good at it now. And anyway, the potholes are ridiculous. Nobody in his right mind would drive a car around here.

They've been in Seattle only a few hours, but they don't waste any time. They trudge through the evening drizzle to find the place they're looking for, and pause at the head of the stairs. It's a bar in a part of the city Dean doesn't recognize from what it was before. The inside is dimly lit with clashing neon, with hyper, gyrating images on the televisions, and he rolls his eyes so hard they hurt. They elbow each other in the ribs and head down the stairs in search of something to drink.

It isn't their scene. Sam flinches at the noise, unused to the number of people, the number of strangers. His shirt is patched too many times, Dean's wool coat too threadbare, both of them too country-ragged and not enough city-ragged. But mostly, they're too old: Dean is forty-two, and he knows his face shows it. Everyone else seems to flit on tiptoe around the room, pierced and taut-skinned and perky. The Winchesters in their heavy boots and plodding steps can't help but be noticed. They hide out at a corner table drinking whisky (neat for Dean, on ice for Sam) to hash out the details of the gossip they've picked up all day, their talk low and coded. They take turns scanning the crowd, automatic, always ready. Dean chuckles to himself about the crazy rumors of a discontented city (mutant dog boy? Seriously?), and takes a swallow of his drink just as Sam stiffens.

"There he is." There's a quaver in Sam's voice. Dean frees his hands and eyeballs for a threat in front of him, but nothing out of the ordinary is going on. Sam reaches without looking and grabs his forearm.

Nerds and weirdoes pace the dim floor, returning to the bar for glowy drinks or clumping together or watching around a pool table in the back. (Of course there's a pool table.) With the click of billiards behind him, Dean Winchester crosses the room and raises a hand to the bartender.

Dean Winchester as he was twenty years ago, skinnier and with all his weight in his shoulders. The coloring is right, the features are right, the length of his stride. His face is smooth and childlike under a ridiculous haircut. He bellies up to the bar, familiar, and smirks at a woman next to him. It's Dean's own smirk.

"It's really him," breathes Sam. They watch as he manufactures intimacy across the sticky surface. A folded bill appears between his fingers and disappears again. The bartender is smiling that way that says she knows his shtick up one side and down the other and is falling for it anyway. The doppelganger smiles back, and even the teeth are the same.

He is heading back across the room with a pitcher of beer in each hand when Sam scrambles to his feet. 

"Don't --" 

Dean's feeble protest goes unheard. His brother is off already, following that doppelganger to the cluster around the pool table. It's impossible for them not to meet. Sam catches up with him and that young stranger can stop on a dime without spilling a drop from the pitchers in his hands. He makes it look easy. He has an agreeable expression on his face, impersonal, when he turns to Sam.

That expression fades as he listens to Sam speak. The eyebrows jump in disbelief or something cynical. He hands off the pitchers to a dark-haired girl who has circled away warily from the pool table. He shuffles off her concern with a sideways glance and a couple of words. Sam's thumb comes up over his shoulder, pointing back at his brother at the corner table. The doppelganger shifts his weight to see around Sam's big body, and notices Dean for the first time. Any remainder of a smile is wiped off his face all at once.

The rest of the pool table crowd are starting to pay attention. The doppelganger has turned white, dread around the corners of his mouth. His body language is stiff, jerky, uncool. He stares at Dean and Dean stares back and after a little of that Dean lowers his head and spares the kid the shame of it. When he looks up again, Sam is leading the doppelganger to their table.

He slings himself into the offered chair in a sulky way, half athletic performance and half adolescent anger. He leans back and crosses his arms, and only looks at Dean when he thinks he's not being looked at. He's got the collar of his jacket flipped up, like in a music video from 1985.

"This is my brother Dean," Sam says, earnest. "What's your name?"

The doppelganger huffs out a breath. His lips purse to say something else, and then he says, "Alec."

Dean breaks in: "Alec what?"

"Just Alec," he gets back, just as quickly. Dean is sure he himself does not look that stupid when he's scared.

"Then I don't guess you'll tell me your mother's name," he says, as nice as he can.

Alec pauses, flicks his eyes toward Sam for a moment. "Don't have one."

"You don't remember her at all?" Sam asks.

"Don't have one," he repeats.

Dean leans on his elbows to ask, "So how old are you, nineteen? Twenty?"

"I'm street-legal in every jurisdiction," purrs Alec, sweet overtop the mean. Dean would almost swear the boy is for sale, which is a thought that obviously shows on his face. Alec is observing his dismay with something like satisfaction.

Sam has to clear his throat before he can get back to the script. "Are you from here? Did you grow up in the city?"

"No."

Dean mirrors the doppelganger: his posture, his expressions. The kid has one hand on the table. His knuckles aren't thick and scarred and two of them healed crooked, but the hand is otherwise pretty much the same. Similar calluses. He bites his nails, but not all the way to the quick. Dean puts his hand down in front of Alec's, not touching, just to show him.

"You mind telling me where you were born?" Dean smirks. "You gotta know that, at least."

"I'm not telling _you_. Look, if you want me to go with you, you're gonna have to use threats." Alec leans in, frowning. "What are you, exactly?"

Both Winchesters pause for a long time. Sam is silent and miserable. Dean drags his eyes away from his brother and says: 

"Well I think it's obvious I'm your father, kid." 

All three of them sit at the table, not looking at anything, while that settles in.

The quiet is broken with a small breathy laugh from Alec. "You're wrong." He is relieved, relaxed in his chair for the first time. Dean clears his throat and sets to explaining:

"I don't know if you have eyes, kid, but you might have noticed a certain similarity. Hell, if I didn't know better I'd say you _are_ me from twenty years ago. 'Cept I had a better haircut." With a little pout, Alec puts a hand to his hair. Dean goes on: "I can think of a lot of ways it might have gone, and probably most of them make me look like an asshole. I don't know who it was, and I don't know why she never called, and I don't know why she didn't tell you about me --" and at this, Alec sits up to protest, but Dean waves him off, "-- but that doesn't mean I wouldn't have stuck around if I'd known."

The kid sits there, confused. 

"A friend of ours saw you on the street. We came as soon as she called." Sam's fingers twitch, counting. "Had to have been soon after you finished highschool, right? He can't be any older than 22."

Dean chuckles a little. "That's a lot of possibilities."

"You guys," Alec says, "are crazy." He makes to stand, and Sam puts out one long arm and stops him. Not in a forceful way, but his wedding ring clinks off the cheap table like a protest. Alec takes his seat again, frustration all over his face.

"Okay," says Dean, serious again. "Okay. I don't know what your story is, and if you don't want to tell me, that's fine. I'm just saying that, looking at you, looking at me, you don't think it's kind of obvious we're related?"

Alec says nothing. He purses his lips to think. It's a familiar look.

"And my dad always said I looked like Mom, and Mom was dead long before you were born, and Sam was a virgin till way too late --"

"Hey," Sam says, without heat, and Alec swallows a laugh.

"--so you tell me. How else does this work?" He jokes, "You some kind of shapeshifter or something?"

Alec tenses through the shoulders, baffled. "...A what?"

"Don't tell me it's just a coincidence you look exactly like my mugshot at eighteen, because coincidences like that don't happen. So unless you got some kind of ability to copy what I look like, then we're back to the one night stand theory. Anyway, the look on your face when Sam brought you over here, you looked like you were on your way to an execution." Dean leans back, lets that word stew a little. The kid's face turns down into a scowl, mouth opening to object. Dean doesn't let him get a word in edgewise: "And I guess what I'm saying is, even if you don't think you need any family, if you're in trouble, we can be here."

"What makes you think I'm in trouble?" Alec's disdain is a careful pose.

"Maybe you're not." Dean hunches forward, keen. "Maybe I guessed wrong. Maybe you don't need anything or anybody."

Alec doesn't blink.

"Dude, you're freaking him out." Sam sighs, puts his hands on the table. "The last thing we want to do is mess up your life. If you want, we can get out of here and leave you alone."

The look of death Dean shoots him has no effect.

"You can go away and think about it, if you want. Whatever kind of contact, or no contact at all, it's up to you. We'll be in the city at least another week. Give him your phone number, Dean."

Dean reaches into his jacket for a scrap of paper and Alec goes on alert. Both Winchesters freeze at once. Free hand open, and with infinite caution, Dean retrieves a book of matches from his pocket. "I'd ask you for a pen, but I think you'd strangle me," he jokes.

Alec looks down. His hands are gripping the edge of the table, curled like claws. He corrects this behavior, turning it into a handhold so that he can tip his chair onto its two back legs. He forces a smile. 

With a pen from his brother, Dean scrawls a string of numbers on the inside of the matchbook. He is methodical, plain. He avoids eye-contact. He tucks the book closed and slides it across the table toward Alec. He withdraws his hand before he is close enough to touch. "Don't need a reason to call. Even after we leave town. Any time."

"We'll go now," adds Sam. "You can go back to your friends and whatever you were doing. You can tell them, I don't know, that we were trying to sell you something."

Alec sets his chair down and fingers the matchbook on the table. "Strip City Deluxe?" he asks, with a chuckle. He seems to be pushing it away, and then it leaps up and disappears into his palm. His face serene, Dean touches his own back pocket to make sure his wallet is still there.

"Guess the public library doesn't give out matchbooks any more."

"Public libraries don't exist any more," Alec corrects him.

Sam eyes the kid and says, "And even when they did, they didn't give out matchbooks." His amusement and Alec's amusement look the same. Dean looks from one to the other and laughs a little.

"I'll think about it," says Alec, standing up. His eyes slide sideways, the intent to throw that matchbook away all over his face. 

The Winchester brothers look up at him from where they're seated. They let him walk away, silent. They don't get up to leave until after Alec has rejoined the crowd at the pool table. His friends are trying politely to let him blend back into their loose group.

"Come on," Dean says, and they shake their stiff bones and head up the stairs to the exit. In the drizzle outside, in the clamor of the smelly, aging city, Sam comes to a halt so suddenly that Dean walks right into him.

"Son of a bitch," Sam exclaims to himself. He pats down his pockets. "I think your son stole my wallet."

Dean breathes out through his nose. "Chip off the old block, I guess."

*

"Earth to Alec. Come in, Alec." Original Cindy reaches up and knocks on his head with her knuckles. Alec whirls and is too late to catch her by her hair.

Watching them from the bench, Max laughs outright. They are in Jam Pony, and on time for once, and that is way too early. On the up side, being a genetically engineered super-soldier means that having to be awake at stupid o'clock in the morning is not physically painful the way it is for ordinaries. That doesn't mean Max is feeling particularly chipper as she pulls on her bike gloves for the day. Every squeak of a badly-oiled locker hinge is a wake-up jolt. The packages waiting to be delivered stack high on the countertop as the morning light filters in. It's still cold enough to see breath outside, cold enough to make bike gearshifts cranky, but that's never stopped Normal from the course of business. He's a jerk that way. 

Alec glares at Cindy. "That hurt, you know." He puts one hand to his head, fussy, to smoothe down his hair. Cindy slips past him and out from among the lockers. 

"Walking into walls hurt more, boo." She doesn't even have to eye the wall of flaking red steel right in front of him, just walks away with one dismissive hand in the air. 

He does, though, stares puzzled at the lockers he almost bashed into. This is the guy that used to be a trainee assassin? Max pats him on the back with a condescending smile as she stands to go.

"Wait," he mutters. He makes a show of secretive glances over her shoulder while she waits for him to spit it out. He's wearing the same rumpled clothes he wore yesterday. Max cringes at the idea of having to teach him to do laundry. She's pretty sure he should know that kind of stuff by now. Alec asks, "You ever heard of an operative named Chandler Bing?"

If they notice, the milling crowd at the dispatch desk will only see Alec shuffling his hands together, like someone with blisters from new gloves. Max watches up close as he flips through a series of small hard plastic shapes: at least one is a driver's license. His hands do their magic and suddenly the top card is a big, beautiful forgery of a sector pass. 

She says, "What kind of a name is Chandler Bing? That's not a real name." She reaches out to grab the pass from him, and he is too fast. He closes his fist around the whole stack.

"Yeah, me neither," he says to himself. While he is distracted, Max grabs again, and pinches his thumb mercilessly till he gives. It's not much of a struggle, really. She fans the pale cards and he puts up an open hand to shield against the curiousity of their bleary coworkers.

Alec has the contents of a wallet: six or eight forms of ID; a folded slip of paper with phone numbers written on it; a couple of small photographs with worn, dulled edges. Max holds the pictures up close to scrutinize. The first is a square snapshot on weird thick paper: just a couple of unfamiliar little girls clowning around with a cat. The second is a picture of Alec, fourteen or fifteen years old, with his arm around the neck of a dark-haired child. She realizes after a second that he's got the child in an inefficient headlock hold. It's a surprise to see him look so... civilian, at that young an age. He's smiling, a-squint in the sun, on the side of an unknown road. The bold and clueless ease of his expression is staggering.

"Who took this?" Max asks, head down. She doesn't want to know if it's going to turn out to be another one of Alec's secret hangups. But he just shrugs his shoulders, and she looks up to that stupid blank expression on his face. He chews on his lower lip and she tries again, "Is whoever took this picture coming after you or something?"

"That's not me," says Alec, knitting his brows.

"Aw, come on."

"Seriously." He shrugs, but he sucks at pretending it doesn't bother him. "I don't know who that is. And anyway, at that age they didn't let me out past the wire unsupervised. There was this one time --"

"Oh," she blurts. If it isn't him, it's his dead twin, of course. Dead almost a year now, and Alec has never shown any interest in him. Alec is incurious about things like that, incurious and untouched, the way a soldier's meant to be. He wasn't sorry to hear that Ben had died; he wasn't sorry they'd never met. It is not possible that he can have found a picture of his own twin by chance.

It's a barrier between them, the dead brother and the history Alec doesn't know. Max works her mouth, and can't bear to say Ben's name aloud. The silence stretches and Alec begins to twitch, fingertips eager to reclaim his loot.

Reluctant, she asks, "Where'd you get this from?"

"Long story," is all Alec says, with a puzzled frown. He plucks the photo from between her fingers.

One of the driver's licenses is from Colorado, with a hologram of snowy mountains in it. Max reads off the name: "Doogie Howser. People name their kids that?" They shake their heads at each other, equally nonplussed. She taps it three or four times: "Is this somebody we need to worry about?"

Alec chuckles to himself. "The military ID says Guy Smiley." He waits for her to find it in her hand, gape at it, strangle a bemused laugh. 

"You're just pissed you didn't think that one up yourself." Alec opens his mouth to protest but Max has moved on from names. "Hey, is this that skeeve from the bar?"

The little picture on Guy Smiley's ID is a picture of the man at Crash. The man who scared Alec so badly, the one he went off with and came back from and lied about. Max examines the face in the picture, its angular masculinity, the hidden set of the eyes. He looks like the boy in the worn photo. The man she saw is far too old to have been a boy when Ben was fourteen.

"Yeah, that's him." Alec frowns, hesitates. "Hey, do you think he looks like me?" 

"Not really," shrugs Max. She sifts through her memory of him: how he talked to Alec all nervous, shocky and shifting his weight from one foot to the other. How Alec seemed afraid of him, but when he came back to the pool table it was contempt or something ugly. "Isn't he older than this? What's he trying to do, pass himself off as an X?" He is about a decade too old to be part of the X-series; they probably hadn't even cracked the nut of genetic design when Guy Smiley was born. So probably, if he's anything, he's a wannabe. The real question is, how did he know to approach Alec?

"I dunno." Alec doesn't say what Guy Smiley is trying to do. It would be possible to interrogate him, to guilt-trip him or provoke him into a confession, but that would require effort and Max isn't up to it. He's not so dumb he would fail to mention an overt threat to their secrecy, and any other possibility is... not something Max particularly wants to know about. The awkward not-talking thing hangs over them for minute or two, while the other messengers bang in and out of their lockers. 

"Well," says Max at last, "at least you know he's an asshole."

Alec grunts, a neutral noise. He plucks the Guy Smiley card out of her fingers, and disappears the whole stack into a pocket inside his jacket. He zips up and adjusts his shoulder satchel and whips up the biggest, most shit-eating grin in the world.

He is clearly psychic. Behind him, Normal is cajoling (okay, threatening) the groggy morning throng. "Bip bip, people," he chirps, a package to be delivered in his hands, and amid the groans Alec and Max head off to find their bikes.

*

The Winchesters don't come back to Crash, but end up at a different bar, one that's older and shabbier and definitely unlicensed. They give no sign that they know Alec is following them when they duck through a rusted steel door and out of sight, but they aren't surprised when he comes inside half an hour later. They're playing pool, or Dean is while Sam watches, his hand around an unlabeled brown bottle. Dean is playing pool with a blonde woman, and losing to her badly.

Alec watches from the bar for a few minutes. Dean is comfortable with the woman, easy: he doesn't seem to care when she curls her lip at him after sinking a ball. "Don't tell me you're taking up poker," she croons.

This woman is of average height, with a face just old enough he doesn't know how old it is. Her hair is dark gold. She might be here to claim she is Alec's mother. Her body doesn't look like it's had babies, but he isn't sure. He doesn't know very many people who've had babies.

She sees him standing there and at once her eyes widen. Alec is very conscious of the potential for making a scene: he crosses to the pool table at a trot. The Winchesters clue into her body language and turn around to greet him before he arrives. The twin smiles on their faces are genuine.

"Hey, Alec. Meet the lady that found you for us," says Dean, jostling the woman. She takes his rough affection but doesn't smile. She is agile, subtle: Dean moves in her space without objection, but somehow she's never in arm's reach of Sam. Not the reason he's wearing that ring, then. Her neck is tense as Alec approaches her, so he stops before he's too close.

"Sorry if you were lying low," she mumbles. Alec pulls off his wool cap and keeps his face neutral, and after a little while she gives up or decides he's not dangerous. "I'm Jo Harvelle."

"Have we met?" he asks, nonplussed.

"No. You sold one of my people a couple of televisions." She shrugs, that _we live in a fucked-up city_ shrug that Alec recognizes. Smuggler, has to be, and pretty powerful if she's got a crew working for her. "I was just checking up and saw you."

"What," grumbles Alec mildly, "and followed me around?"

"Yeah, a little. I guess I thought you were Dean, at first." She glances from one to the other and back again, as if she's still not sure. 

Dean leans on the edge of the table and laughs. "You didn't even know me when I looked like that."

"If you'd looked like that when I knew you," she retorts, "I wouldn't have taken no for an answer."

They all laugh then, all but Alec. He searches one face after another, their nostalgia for a time and place he's never been, and bristles unaccountably. The lines around their eyes and mouths fan and stretch, emphasizing their ages compared to his. He hates the idea of being the junior member of this little gathering. They settle around him, laughed out, and return to the present. Sam sits back, in a way that makes himself smaller and less noticeable than his size would predict. The woman Jo is twirling her cue between her hands.

Dean is on the far side of the table, calculation on his face. He lines up an impossible shot, four five and six all in a row in reverse order, and hits the cue ball with a neat efficiency Alec has never seen before. The balls roll, obedient, into their pockets and Dean stands up to watch. He doesn't even smile, but Sam does. "Oh, now you're just showing off," he chides.

Dean is looking at Alec: that calm, waiting gaze. Alec craves it suddenly and reaches out for Jo's cue without even looking at her. She doesn't fight him for it, just steps out of the way as the two lookalikes stand across from each other at the table. On both their arms, the hair stands on end; Alec can see Dean's pulse throb in his throat. They hold each other's gaze, eyes alike. Of course they will compete. Alec has been half-thinking it since the moment they met.

"All right," says Dean, and sets down his cue. He is unhurried as he gathers the sunk balls and rolls them back on the table. There's a smirk on his face that Alec is hoping to wipe off. He wonders whether to stake money, or whether that would be taken wrong.

They pace around each other, prowling the table, and glance at each other out of the corners of their eyes. They've gotten a few funny looks from the other people in the bar, and are ignoring them.

"It's not about the game," says Dean. Deliberate, he slides the rack into place on the table and lifts it. The balls lie still: his movements are smooth. He wraps an arm around his cue as if it were a support beam, and waits for Alec to break. "You want to pull off a hustle, it's all in the stuff you do _off_ the table."

It is impossible not to showboat. Alec leans in and places his hand on the green baize just so. It's worn a little here and there, the color thinner in some spots than others. Alec assesses the shape of the table's flaws as he settles the cue between thumb and forefinger. He is rearing back to strike when Dean tells him,

"Now see, that right there, that's a tell." 

Alec has just enough self-control to stop himself and re-settle his hand before trying again. The balls go rolling, thump into the corner pocket, and Dean is watching him with a smile. "You're picky, about how you set your hand. Shows you're a student of how it's played, that you've got the patience to figure out a consistent stance. You play like that, even if you lose, they'll know you're hustling them."

"Maybe I just like to win," Alec retorts.

Dean paces around the far side of the table while Alec readies for his next shot. He muffs it. 

"Got you unsettled, didn't I? You'll need to work on that." Dean is standing there under the vertical lights, forehead aglow and eyes in shadow. "Get somebody to yell at you while you practice. Learn to tune out the noise as much as the words." His face is blameless as he leans in for his first shot. Alec can see the difference in their postures, how a man in his forties carries his weight differently, how much lower his center of gravity is. There's a stiffness in Dean's back, an old injury or just wear and tear, that makes him look vulnerable. But he makes his shot.

"Where'd you learn to play?" Alec asks, as Dean comes back around. It would be impossible to crowd him, the way he moves and the attention he can give the table. Bravado's no good. Verbal distraction might not work either, and Alec will be all out of tricks.

Dean takes his next shot. "Dive bars," he says, punctuating it with the clatter of balls bouncing away from pockets. "Arcade games take quarters, and you get bored with 'em after a while. Pool table's entertainment forever, or till the customers break the cues over each other's heads. You?"

Alec pauses. "Community center?" he says at last.

The balls on the table come to rest without any sinking and Dean nods at him. "You see how I did that? Just shaved a couple degrees off the angle."

"Did what?" asks Alec absently, as he takes his turn. Dean waits for him to strike before chuckling,

"Blew the shot, kid. Doesn't take a show, just a little bit wrong at the contact point."

The five sinks into a pocket and the cueball rolls right back to where it started like a dream. "You missed on purpose? What'd you do that for?"

Lines fan out across Dean's temples. "Babe in the woods," he mutters to himself. Then, sardonic: "You actually make a living at this?"

"No," scoffs Alec. "I got a job. This is pocket money and beers."

"Cause if you want to make a living at it, you gotta be willing to lose." Dean leans on his cue, and some subtle change comes over him, indescribable little motions, so that suddenly his ego's on the outside, and Alec's looking at an angry middle-aged braggart, beat down in his day job and looking to win a few back at night. The cue comes up -- it's not even his turn -- and the way it moves in his hands Dean is suddenly just that littlest bit awkward, banging himself in the knee with it, a-fumble between his fingers. He looks like a clueless tool. He's the kind of player Alec would challenge immediately, the kind he'd clean out in about twenty minutes, the kind he would sneer at. It is loathesome, to see Dean turn into someone like that.

"What --" Alec is not sure what he is asking. Dean shuffles off that persona with a grin, his charisma like a beacon in the dim room. Alec suppresses a little shudder on realizing that he likes this strange man named Dean Winchester.

It is his turn, but Alec isn't up to strategizing at the moment. Dean eyes him from the other side of the table, and then he's on his way around. "Hey, whoa. Stick with me, kid." He reaches into Alec's space, puts a hand on his shoulder. As if he has the right, as if Alec can't grab him by the wrist and throw him to the concrete floor. Dean tightens his grip into a squeeze and says, "You looked a little sick, there."

He says it low, not to draw attention or anything, but Sam is already alert and drinks in every pause and gesture. Alec had forgotten he was even there until that moment, and he shakes off both Dean's hand and his concern with brittle irritation.

"Nothing," he mumbles, and then, reclaiming ground, "just freaks me out, what it'll be like when my looks go."

Dean makes an elaborate groan of disgust. Sam cracks up, laughs so hard he has to steady himself on the table, while Jo glances from Dean to Alec and back again with a strange little smile on her face. 

"Oh, that was awesome," gasps Sam, one arm across his ribs as if in pain.

Dean flips his brother the bird, and that just makes the laughter louder. "You don't know from ugly, kid. Your turn."

It is Alec's turn. The balls lie still in front of him, the angles obvious, cause and effect and no hidden factors. He leans in to assess the pool table, and struggles to ignore the Winchesters as they heckle one another.

*

They are walking back to Jo's place. It's cold but clear, the stars like little glowy ice-pellets. Up in the sky, late-on in the night, it almost seems like nothing's changed. Too bad you can't see to step over the people sleeping in doorways with your head in the clouds.

Jo walks pretty fast, head down and hands in her pockets. She's been quiet this whole time, just the facts. Still, Dean can't help press her on the details.

"Was it coin silver, or --"

Her answer is curt and dry, like the air. "Sterling." 

"You watched it yourself?" Behind him, Dean can feel Sam get uneasy. Of course Sam hates this part.

But Jo doesn't seem to mind that he can't take her word for it. "Got a warehouse boss who knows a thing or two. He did the testing, I watched from a distance. Silver, holy water, binding forms, the guy checks out. I still have the scrying glass back at my place, if you want a look." 

Having met the kid, Dean doesn't really need a scrying glass. He knows what he'd see: just a kid, just flesh and sinews, just somebody ordinary. There's no con that long, no con that relies that much on coincidence, and anyway ghouls and beasties just aren't that patient. Jo's been watching him for weeks. Dean's made his peace with it: no supernatural funny business, just the old fashioned kind of funny business. For the hundredth time, he flashes on a pornographic memory: flushed skin and moisture and that smell, sweat slicking them together. It bothers him that he doesn't know who Alec's mother was. In his imagination, he doesn't see a face; it's all carnal without ever being personal.

It's weird to think about that around Jo, what with their awkward not-history. Dean wants to say something nice to her, and can't think of anything that isn't stupid. She's changed since the first time they met: less bravado, more get-on-with-it. She's more like her mother. Even though it's a compliment, Dean has enough sense not to say that out loud.

"God, can you imagine?" Sam busts out suddenly. It's too loud in the night, startling. His breath flies from his mouth like a ghost. "If you'd known? Our whole lives would have been different."

He says it like he just thought of it, but Dean is not that dumb. There's a reason they hardly said ten words to each other the whole forever-long train ride up here. Now that it's sure, now that they've seen the kid and talked with him, the recriminations can legitimately get started. In the darkness, nobody can see Dean roll his eyes.

They walk on, silent, a little tense. Sam is obviously waiting for a response and Dean doesn't have one. "You think?" he says at last.

"Dude, of course. I wouldn't have gone to Stanford if you'd been raising a child."

Between them, Jo gives a grunt. Her boots make satisfying thumps on the uneven pavement. One of the true tragedies of the world almost ending is that women don't bother with heels much any more. (Apparently, they are not much help when running away, or something.) She shrugs her jackets closer around her neck and Dean remembers she _has_ a kid. She _is_ raising a kid. They've seen the pictures in her tiny apartment.

But there won't be any pictures of Alec, not from before however old he is now, unless he's got a stash of his own that he's willing to part with. It's kind of a nice fantasy, to think Dean could have pulled up to some driveway every couple of months and said hello, but fantasy's all it is. Dean would have made a terrible father, and every woman he's ever met has known it. Better for everyone that it worked out this way. Not that Sam wants to hear it.

"If you'd settled down, I wouldn't have fought with Dad so much," Sam goes on. "I wouldn't have gone halfway across the country to get away. And you wouldn't have taken the risks you've taken, if you --"

Sam trails off finally, because he can see the cock-eyed look Dean is giving him or because he's realized how wishful he sounds. Skip Stanford, miss out on demons, avoid the apocalypse -- sure, one kid could do all that, just by being born. No pressure. 

Jo keeps her mouth shut. Dean had forgotten how good she is at that, at just not saying anything and watching what's going on. They walk on without anybody saying anything for a while. "Well," Sam adds, slow, "things would have been different."

Dean makes a noise and changes the subject. "Dad would have gone apeshit."

They can all laugh at that, little bright coals of sound in the crisp air. The noise is enough to send the rats scurrying down the alley ahead of them.

"Dad would have loved Alec," Sam asserts, and he turns so his eyes glint off some distant light-source, full of shine. "He'd have been pissed at you, but he'd have loved Alec."

He's in the middle of turning away so he won't have to look at his brother when a shadow flashes across Dean's line of vision. Almost without thinking he assesses the threat: human-sized, not-human-shaped. His awareness of Sam's mood falls away and he peers into the dark while he feels himself down for weapons. Jo brushes against him, just forearm-to-forearm to identify her proximity. Her knife is open in her hand and ready.

They stalk down the alley towards the shadow. Sam behind them pulls his hands out of his pockets and stumbles along, rusty. He carries no weapon, and probably isn't that much use in a fight any more except for his size. But he hasn't forgotten everything: his tread is light on the tar and his posture stealthy as he slides up behind Dean and stares into the dim. "What did you see?" he asks at a whisper. Dean shushes him with a hand. The flash of Jo's fingers provides a plan of attack, and with that old smooth teamwork they round the corner at the ready. 

It's a narrow street, not much more than an alley, but with just enough light for good sightlines. Huddled against the brick on the far side of the street, some strange shape turns their way, eyes a-glow. They are orange eyes, like a cat or a possum in the night, orange eyes in a masked human face. The shape is far too large to be a possum, a soda bottle clutched to its chest. Dean feels the hot tickle on his neck of Sam's startled breath.

There is only just that moment of surprise on both sides. Dean opens his mouth to shout and the creature is gone, galloping on all fours down the street, tight against the sides of buildings. Its back is sinous and slinking in a way that definitely isn't human. It darts under a lit window and reveals its bushy tail, mottled tawny and brown. It is wearing frayed gray sweat pants and some kind of jacket. They listen as it flees into the darkness, its claws clicking against the pavement, and it's gone.

The soda bottle rolls discarded on the tar. Jo breathes out long. She seems less shocked than she should be. She closes her knife and tucks it away, tidy.

The face of that thing, the narrow nose and the flare of its skull and the Lone Ranger mask around the eyes. "So," Dean forces out, as he tucks his gun back into his jeans, "City's got a real raccoon problem, huh?"

Sam is standing there with his mouth open. It's pretty funny. Jo doesn't laugh. "I guess so," she says, and shrugs.

*

It's kind of neat to be able to say that at least one of his friends lives in a real house. Alec isn't really sure he'd call Joshua a friend (although he doesn't know what else to call him), and the house is... well, it's a house. Abandoned and full of dusty crap, but Joshua at least doesn't have anybody thumping on his walls when he plays the radio at 4am. Alec takes the steep front steps double-time.

"Hey Rover," he calls, as he lets himself in. "Special delivery."

"Special?" The response comes from the back room: of course, Joshua is painting. His high, querulous voice is so weird compared to his huge shape. 

Alec paces back towards the kitchen with the grocery sack balanced on one hip. "Okay, regular delivery," he admits with a grin. "Max had a thing, so she asked me to swing by."

The wave of his shaggy hair preceding -- it's kind of a miracle he hasn't tangled some damn thing in that mane and had to have it cut off -- Joshua spins around. A big smile splits his face and he drops his palette with a clatter. "You owe her bigtime!"

"She told you that, did she? Okay, what do we got." Alec pulls a bunch of stuff from the sack, stuff with like leaves and green tassels. "Are these carrots? I think these are carrots. Do you even eat carrots?" 

"I eat everything," says Joshua, and wipes one hand on his shirt before grabbing the leafy thing. In his big, clawed mitt, it looks like a funny little green brush with an orange handle. He bites off an inch of carrot with a resounding _chunk_ and chews with his mouth open. Alec pauses in the middle of sorting out the weird stuff from the real food, like chips, to watch Joshua amble around his kitchen. The ceilings are high enough for him, so he doesn't look entirely out of place. Alec notes his height compared to the back door, and realizes that Joshua is only an inch or two taller than Sam Winchester.

The similarity bugs him. It makes Sam seem weirder, or Joshua less weird. Alec devotes himself to putting the groceries away. The dishes are clean and stacked neatly in the cabinets, all the food organized and with the labels turned the same way. Like the kitchens he's seen on TV, and not at all like Alec's own kitchen. Which is more of a liquor cabinet with a few boxes of cereal.

"Hey Alec?" Joshua has eaten the carrot all the way down to the stump, and is sniffing at the green tassels on the end. "You think I could paint with this?"

"I dunno," Alec tells him. "You paint with, like, rags and stuff, right? You can paint with carrots if you want to. You're the artist."

Joshua spins the green carrot-top. Its sharp, woody smell fills the room between them. "Music is art, too," he says at last.

Alec shrugs him off. "Can't paint with a piano."

"Oh!" Joshua's hands go up, and he tosses the carrot-top over his shoulder. "Piano! I found things inside."

There's a brief cringey moment in Alec's head of imagining Joshua at the badly-tuned upright in the basement, his big hands plonking away at the keys as he howls his own accompaniment. And then he's over it. Joshua lives in his own house -- anyway, his by squatter's rights -- so he can make whatever terrible music he wants. But when Joshua takes Alec's hand he isn't leading him down the stairs, just back into the living room where the easel is set up. Against the bookshelves, he's leaned ten or twenty pieces of stiff paper: photographs. Portraits, from a long time ago. People sitting stiff, with carefully neutral expressions on their faces. The easel in front of them has a rough approximation of a face outlined in sepia-brown.

"Family pictures," says Joshua, and points. The one at his-eye level is a woman with her hair up in a big cloud around her head, a cameo at her throat. "Father's family, from way long ago."

"Yeah, they're pretty old," Alec mumbles. He stuffs his hands into his pockets, and doesn't look too carefully. "You found 'em inside the piano?"

"Lots and lots." Joshua grabs up his palette, a little plate of grays and browns and blacks and a dollop of startling white. He dashes back into the kitchen, and leaves Alec alone with the staring crowd. Their weird pale eyes accuse him from across the room till he turns his back. When Joshua returns, he's got another carrot. Its greens go into the brown paint, just a little bit, and then he dabs little delicate clouds above the temples of his painting. 

"Hey, that's pretty good," Alec tells him. It's only a minute or two before the painted face starts to look like the woman in the photo, or at least like an outline of her. "So... you think they're Doctor Sandeman's family?"

"His piano, his family," Joshua says over his shoulder. He is wrapped up in the painting now; he'll probably forget to eat again till sundown. Alec thinks about mentioning that the piano might not be his, that anybody could have moved their crap in here in the last 20 years, but decides against it.

He's done his duty, and all the food's put away in the kitchen. Alec can leave now, and go make some money instead of standing around like a piece of furniture. He listens as Joshua hums to himself, toneless, big nostrils flaring and blowing air at the fine pattern of paint. Alec blurts, "So how come you call him your dad? Sandeman, I mean?"

Joshua pauses and steps away from the easel to see what progress he's made. Absently, he takes a bite of the carrot in his hand. "I'm his son. He's my father."

"But, like, how'd you know?" Alec frets at how that sounds. "Was he just some guy that was always around, or?"

Joshua turns all the way around, that hangdog face of his serious, maybe a little reverential. "Kept me safe. No barcode."

Alec touches the back of his neck. No barcode, but with a face that says _science experiment_ all over it. Alec's pretty sure he got the better end of that bargain. He keeps his features neutral and after a minute Joshua goes back to his painting.

"You should tell Max," he says, over his shoulder. "Somebody's in the sewers."

"Somebody?" asks Alec.

Those big, flanneled shoulders shrug: Joshua isn't exactly the best guard dog in the world. "Saw somebody climbing out, down the corner. I tried to say hi and they ran. Guess I'm too ugly."

"I dunno, dude. Size alone could scare off a lot of people." With a low curdle in his gut that Max calls a conscience and he calls indigestion, Alec finds himself asking, "Josh, hey Josh, you haven't been out during the day, have you?"

Joshua blows his hair back over his shoulder, and dabs again at the canvas. "Don't go out in daylight. No freaks."

Right. No freaks. And the truth is, well, he _is_ a freak. The long slope of his nose, the split in the middle of his upper lip, his jowls, the occasional drool: he's a six-and-a-half foot tall golden retriever. That talks. You don't get much freakier than that, not among the ordinaries. Alec doesn't know what the lizard-types and the rat-types and the bird-types have done, the ones that survived. Gone to ground in the wilderness, maybe. He's never troubled himself to find out.

He doesn't have to. He looks human. That was supposed to make things easier.

*

Dean won't wear a hat. He and Sam have argued about it for a while, and haven't convinced each other. They split up in front of their borrowed apartment with the issue still unresolved, or rather, with Sam still trying to change his brother's mind and Dean digging in his heels as usual.

"The whole point of surveillance is that you don't look like the mirror image of your target," Sam hisses, and stuffs his hands into his pockets against the late-morning chill.

"It's not surveillance," Dean corrects him. He has a look of distaste on his face. "I'm just looking out for him." And with that, he drops his chin and flips up the collar of his coat, and steps out into the rain. Sam stands under the eaves for a few minutes, watching him go, and sighs.

If he won't wear a hat in Rocky Mountain snow, of course he won't wear one just for a disguise. His stride isn't quite as obviously cocky as usual, though, and he hunches against the weather. As the street crowd swirls around him, shuffling garbage bags and scarred Tupperware against the cold deluge, he almost blends in.

Sam settles his rabbitskin cap down to his own eyebrows, and gets to wandering within the sector. The marketplace is promising, a gaggle of vans and tables under a corrugated tin roof: maybe a warehouse Before, or maybe it was assembled piecemeal since then. There is no obvious order to the salespeople, not even any clear rows for ease of traffic, but everybody seems to know where to go. Raw meat for sale next to pairs of gray tube socks, folded carefully, and the next table after that is soaps and lotions Rose will love. The shoppers are all kinds, old and young, carefully stowing their purchases in string bags or overcoat pockets. There are no children: either it's a neighborhood good enough for a school, or it's a neighborhood bad enough that children aren't allowed outside at all.

The gossip is thick in the air. Sam listens avidly while he stares at goods so rare back home he hardly knows what to offer for them. To linger at the corner of a table is to pick up wild stories of crocodiles in the sewers and assassinations of impertinent journalists. No, not crocodiles; lumbering man-beasts without human speech. No, not in the sewers, but rising up to walk the streets after dark, and steal away children. A vendor of spare bicycle parts swears he has seen with his own eyes a man-sized wolf in a business suit walk down Hanscom Street in broad daylight. Strange times, they repeat, one after another: strange times, end times. Sam wants to laugh, and doesn't. Houses have blown up; mysterious fires somewhere south of the city; rumors of new identity cards to prove you belong in Seattle. He nods at each spiralling speculation doled out over the merchandise at no more cost than the price of breath.

It is a mistake, that nod. The conversation pauses abruptly, and all eyes rest on him before darting away. A bald man in an apron mumbles something in a foreign language -- Chinese? Sam isn't sure -- and the salespeople launch into an impassioned discussion about how transport costs drive up prices. They're very apologetic to one another. They don't get bored with the topic till Sam takes a hint and moves on.

Other people in the marketplace notice him now, where they had not before. He catches frowns and hoods raised quickly into place and more than one person pale and frightened. Sam has never lived in a police state before. It takes him a moment to realize that he has been pegged as a government agent or a spy. The absurdity of it is quickly overwhelmed by the crowd's contagious unease. He turns to leave, and discovers he has tucked his chin into his collar, head down: he's pretty sure that his reason for staying hid has got all theirs beat, hands down.

Sam is pacing his way toward the exit when he catches a familiar sharp whiff. Alert, he hones in on a little cart half-out in the drizzle but doing a healthy business anyway. It's a dilapidated establishment, like an outhouse lashed to a tricycle, but the dark little woman inside is taking in cash and handing out steaming cups of -- Sam steps into line.

When his turn comes, he blurts his request like the bumpkin he's become: "Do you have coffee?"

The woman's disbelief creases her face and sets her braids tinkling around her ears. "Babe, what part of the city you think you're in?"

"Oh." Sam lets his shoulders deflate.

"But what I do have --" she interrupts his hopelessness, "-- is the finest chicory you can grow in the west, roasted and ground just _like_ coffee. Pick you right up, add a little corn syrup and you can't tell the difference. Eight bucks a cup, five if you bring back the mug, discount if you can pay in Loonies." She flips her scarf back around her neck, at ease, waiting for him to be won over.

It doesn't take long. Sam shells out eight dollars and gets a chipped mug (that says _Virginia is for Lovers_ ) full almost to spilling with greasy dark liquid. He stands beside the cart and takes his first sip. It's bitter and sour, like chewing on twigs, not really like coffee at all, but he husbands the cup close to his face, inhaling the steam with gusto.

He settles on the spalled brick stoop of a shuttered building and nurses his fake-coffee for a good twenty minutes before it's gone. Intent on the last drops, he does not notice he is being observed until a slim body steps up in front of him. It's a young woman with a bicycle, middling height, her dark brown hair loose all over her shoulders. The frown on her face is not impersonal. Sam looks up at her for a long moment.

"Yes?" he asks at last.

She glares down at him. "Guy Smiley, I presume?"

Blinking, Sam makes the connection. Pert chin and wide lips, prominent eyes. He _has_ seen this face before. He struggles to interpret her open hostility. "You're one of Alec's friends. From the bar."

"Max." Her mouth moves in an expression that isn't a smile. Her bicycle is between them, not in an ostentatious way, but in a way that makes clear that it's a barrier. She knows how to defend herself. "I don't know who you are, though."

Sam pinks a little, hesitating. "I'm Sam Winchester. Can I have my wallet back?"

Max says nothing. Sam has considerable practice with waiting out a conversation, except that his practice is with Dean, who only ever lasts about a minute. He gives in first. 

"That's really my name. I'm not here running a scam or looking to get anything from Alec. The reason I'm here is because I'm his uncle."

Max freezes, even her ribcage unnaturally still. Sam glances around them, alert to the scrutiny they might be garnering. After a few moments, she gathers herself and puts on a sarcastic face to ask, "How are you so sure?"

He shakes his head. "You and him both. The way you dismiss it, it's like it's absurd to even think he has a father."

"Cause he doesn't?" Max retorts, hipshot. But she has her back to the crowd, and can't see Dean striding towards them from the closest sector checkpoint. Sam examines her face, the little puckers of distrust at her mouth, while his brother crosses the street. At just the right moment, he shifts to make room for Dean, who slides past a startled Max and settles on the stoop.

It's supposed to be a funny moment, but Max's shock is horrified rather than comical. Sam mumbles out the punchline: "Whatever you say, kid."

Dean gives her his dazzling smile and nudges Sam with an elbow. "What, d'you find coffee in this godforsaken place?"

"Who _are_ you?" she demands. Her voice has become loud, her posture openly hostile. People will notice, in a moment.

Dean guesses quickly what's going on. "Use your inside voice, girl. Alec sent you?"

"No," she spits, sulky.

"Touchy." 

Max is still staring. She makes an awkward pretense that she isn't, and then forgets all over again and openly looks over Dean from head to toe. Whatever she sees, she is near to crying. Dean lets it go on for a while, long enough he swipes Sam's mug and runs his finger along the inside for a taste of the fake coffee. "God, that crap's worse than 7-11 used to be. Listen, if you see him, tell him we said Hi."

"I'm not his secretary."

"Max," Sam cuts in. "We're just trying to be --"

"What do you want from him?" Her grip on her handlebars is tight, forearms a-tremble. Sam can't tell whether it's fear or fury or both. 

"From Alec?" Dean hands the mug back to Sam and scratches his jaw. "I don't know. I guess I just wanted, you know, I got a son I didn't even know about, I wanted to hear how his life turned out. If there's anything I can do for him."

"Do for him," Max repeats, in disbelief.

"I don't know, teach him how to tie his shoes. I can tell he's good with his hands. This kind of place, I hope he already knows how to take care of himself. You his girlfriend?"

" _No_."

"Oh. Well, if he needs help in that department I can definitely give him a few pointers." Dean chuckles low, and Sam takes the opportunity to smack him on the back of his head.

"This is crazy." One gloved hand flies up and Max wishes away the whole conversation with a flutter of her fingers.

Sam hunches forward to ask, "Is it? Is it really so crazy?" They frown, Sam and Dean in unison at this woman standing above them, while she frowns back. "If you saw someone who was obviously your kin just walking down the street, just passing right in front of you and doesn't recognize you, wouldn't you say something?"

Max doesn't have a retort ready. Her brown eyes are wide, hurt.

"He's got plenty of reason to be pissed at me," Dean adds, with a philosophical shrug. "He doesn't want to talk to me, nothing I can do about that. But if he needs anything --"

"Don't you know?" Sam demands. "That's what families do. Help each other out, without expecting to get paid for it."

"I know that," Max tells him, indignant.


	2. Reverse Transcriptase

The sound of Cindy coming home startles Max out of her reverie. "Hey," she calls into the hallway, and can't help but look back into the mirror again.

"Hey, boo," comes the reply. Thumps of packages; it's Cindy's turn to do the shopping. "Where you at, girl? I found some chocolate. The good kind." She is wandering down the hall, coming closer. Max takes a deep breath and decides not to lie.

"I'm in here," she says, just as Cindy is stepping into the doorway. Raincoat already off, she pulls at her knitted hat till her hair pops free, a cheerful cloud around her face. She tosses the hat and holds up the silver-wrapped package.

"I still got the ability to count," she says, head cocked. "So I know it's not that time of the month. So I ask myself, what reason's a girl got to hang out in the bathroom all day?"

Max gives her a smile, and it fails miserably. "I, uh." She is a little at a loss how to start. She tries again: "I was just wondering what I'm gonna look like when I'm old."

Cindy's snort is magnificently amused, and impossible to ignore. This time Max's smile is real, a little rueful. It's not often she feels like the helpless one, and it's such a stupid thing to be ignorant about.

"I just realized, I don't know. I mean, I've seen old people, but I don't know what my kind of old people will look like." She crosses her arms over herself, and then uncrosses them.

"I don't even want to know what got under your skin," says Cindy, with a shake of her head. Max climbs up on the sink to give her room and Cindy comes into the bathroom too. "You been looking at yourself all this time? You frown too much it gets stuck that way."

"That's not true," says Max. "Gimme."

Methodical, Cindy tugs at the corners of the candy wrapper and peels the silver plastic away. She breaks off a chunk and hands it to Max. 

They can do this, cram together in a little room, just sharing a chocolate bar and not having to say anything. They can do this, and not fight or dig at each other, not compete, not be messed up at all, just feel the chocolate melting on their tongues and enjoy it and enjoy each other and be easy. Cindy is the only person Max can be like this with, now; she is almost reluctant to speak and break the comfortable silence.

"You remember some of your family, right?" Max asks, halting. Cindy doesn't exactly bring the topic up, ever. "What they looked like when they got older?"

Cindy makes a face, and snaps off another chunk of chocolate. "I guess. My grandma, a little. I mean, everybody get old the way they do, right? Aint the same for each person."

"I mean --" but Max doesn't really know what she means. She shifts a little and can see her face in the mirror again. She pokes at her cheek with a forefinger in lieu of answering, and watches her elastic skin snap back into place, unmarred.

None of the X-5s has lived to be more than twenty-five yet. There is no knowing what they will look like as they age. Except now, with Alec. Max knows what he'll look like when he's old, and that knowledge is frightening in a way she doesn't understand.

"My grandma was one big wrinkle," Cindy says at last. She stands up and comes to look in the mirror over Max's shoulder. She smiles and Max can't help but smile back and their cheeks bump into each other. Max's skin is more supple than Cindy's; ordinaries scar in a way she and Alec don't. "Here, and here, and here." Cindy's fingertip brushes on Max's face: between her brows, around the outsides of her eyes, at the corners of her mouth. They look at each other in the glass. It is strange, to think that far into the future.

Max opens her mouth to tell about the man she met today. She hasn't seen Alec since morning, so she hasn't had the opportunity to layer her new knowledge onto his face. She is trying not to imagine it, his smooth fresh features with the little tell-tales of how he'll change, like somebody picked up his head and shook it really hard so the connections underneath the skin got subtly stretched out of shape. The flesh under his eyes thinner and darker till he looks tired all the time; his smile set with permanent parentheses creasing down his cheeks; his neck become rough and his smooth forehead lined and and the mere dusting of freckles he has now turned into a riot of dark and white spots from years in the sun. He'll settle into his body and be stockier, more imposing. Maybe he'll go a little gray at the temples, or maybe that's just a trick of daylight on light-colored hair.

It's too unsettling. Max doesn't know how to say it. She knows she is crossing a boundary when she asks Cindy, "Do you ever miss your family?"

Cindy's pause is long, tense. She shifts her weight and Max can see in her the tidiness, how she sweeps away her regrets for some other time, some private time. "I don't know what you talking bout, girl. I am in the very bosom of my family at this exact moment."

It would be cruel not to play along. "Yeah, I know you want my bosoms," Max laughs, and lunges for the chocolate bar. But Cindy knows how this game works, and raises her arm out of reach, laughing, fully aware that Max could take it from her if she really wanted.

*

Old habits die hard, or anyway, Dean Winchester has never needed a reason to snoop. He is enjoying the rusty glory of a junk lot, just a-wander among the old Detroit hardbodies. An awful lot of people live in those hardbodies these days, with lawn chairs instead of leather seats, and build fires where the engines ought to be. Dean's bedded down in the Impala plenty of times, but only so he can get up in the morning and get back on the road. Not to stay in one place forever, without even a windshield to keep out the rain.

The few cars he's seen on the street -- official cars, cop cars -- are the new plastic kind with the fuel cells, that hum in first gear like a kazoo. They look like Tonka toys, all rounded edges and blunted shine, not like real cars at all. Those things don't growl, and they don't take gasoline or even cooking oil, and they don't do more than fifty-five on the highway (he has been unfortunate enough to discover). It bugs him that Alec might not know how to drive.

It's sundown by the time he trudges back toward Jo's apartment. Trashcan fires are the brightest lights around, like streetlights showing you the way. There's always a couple of hunched people at an intersection, the more layers of clothing the further away you can smell them. Dean's pretty tired of his fellow man, about now: he heads into the middle of the street to walk, so he won't have to get close to anybody.

Which is how he's almost run over by a skinny little punk on a bicycle. The bike comes whipping out of the dark, slim city tires and no engine noise for a warning, and Dean leaps back with a curse. The front wheel makes a surprise swerve and up comes the back wheel and the rider goes ass over teakettle onto the pavement. His landing doesn't sound soft.

"Damn it, kid," Dean grumps, but all the same he heads over to check on the guy. He is a guy, probably no older than twenty, with unwashed hair under a knitted cap and short pants on. His shins are bleeding onto his more-duct-tape-than-shoe shoes. Dean crouches down in front of him. "Should look into getting headlights, if you --"

The guy's face perks up with recognition as he takes Dean's hand. "Oh hey, sorry, Alec. Whoa. You're not Alec." He stares at Dean in the half-light.

"Uh, no." Dean shakes his head and pulls himself together. "I'm, uh, I'm the older, handsomer model. You work with him?" He pulls the guy to his feet and retrieves the banged-up bike.

While his back is turned, the guy says in a dopey voice, "Wait, what...?"

"I'm his dad." He tries not to beam, saying that. It's his first time, like laying claim to something, like planting a flag. He hands the guy his bike in lieu of a handshake. "Dean Winchester."

"I'm Sketchy." The guy stands there with his eyes wide. In the dim light, it's hard to say whether his pupils are that large just for seeing or because he's stoned out of his head. He asks again, "Alec McDowell has a dad?"

"Don't know how to break this to you, kid, but everybody's got one." They stand in front of each other for an awkward pause. The guy is still bleeding from his knees, and doesn't seem to notice or care. Dean prods, "So, you work with him?"

"Yeah, how'd you know?" At last Sketchy (really? That's his name?) pulls some kind of rag or towel out of his pocket and dabs off his knees. He seems pretty philosophical about getting banged up, as if it happens a lot.

"You got that scrawny look. And weird taste in hats. What is it with bike messengers and ridiculous hats?" Dean asks.

"Yeah, well," and Sketchy seems to come awake, his eyes narrowing toward the conspiratorial. "The messenger thing is just a day job. I'm working on getting my credentials as a reporter."

"Yeah? How long you been working on that?"

"Couple months." The guy is ridiculously proud.

Dean can't control his laughter. "Two hours in a Kinko's should do the trick, man." Sketchy doesn't get it, and after a minute Dean remembers that Kinko's went out of business years ago. "Look, people love to talk. They just need an excuse, and a piece of paper that says you work for the Blowhard Daily would do the trick."

Sketchy stiffens. "You mean, like a forgery?"

"Kids these days." Dean shakes his head. If this is the kind of guy Alec hangs out with --

"Cause, I'm not into that kind of stuff." Sketchy makes a defensive move with one hand. "I told Alec, I'm not up for any more of his deliveries."

Aha. Dean settles his shoulders and pretends it's just idle curiosity. "What's he got going on?"

"Well not any more. He was selling steroids to a bunch of steelheads down in sector four." Sketchy does not notice the interest with which Dean is listening. "They beat the crap out of me, and then he beat the crap out of them, and then Max promised to beat the crap out of _him_ till he stopped selling."

Dean thinks over the scenario. Max, again: she seems to be everywhere Alec is. "So is she like his girlfriend or what?"

"Or what." Sketchy gives a awed grin. "Max is so out of his league. She's out of everybody's league. She's kind of like Wonder Woman on a bike."

"Seems like she thinks Alec's her business," says Dean, suspicious.

"Everything's her business," Sketchy tells him. "She's kinda awesome that way."

*

The thing about volunteering to do the dishes is, you roll up your sleeves and that old demonic scar on your forearm that your wife thinks is cute makes Jo stiffen up. She's pretty subtle about it, and doesn't say anything as she continues on toward the sink, plate in hand. Sam gets out of her way and she turns on the tap. "Dish towel's on your right," she says. 

Sam rolls his sleeves back down and takes up the dish towel. Behind them in the living room, Dean pokes through Dad's old journal, humming to himself. He clearly hasn't seen.

And that's how it goes: she washes and he dries. She's got real dish soap, which makes the job a lot easier, and he only has to ask her a couple of times where in the cabinet the clean dishes go. Jo keeps her mouth closed and her back straight, but that's not very much different from her default state. They've been pretty quiet with one another: it's been eleven years. It is easier to pretend they are complete strangers than to talk about history. One of the cabinet doors squeaks, and Sam thinks about whether he's seen any machine oil, whether it would be too forward to offer to fix that for her.

"I'm used to doing them all myself," is what comes out of his mouth. "When my wife's away. The girls are too small to be much help."

"She away a lot?" Jo asks, but it's a perfunctory question. The soapy sponge in her hand circles and circles on the back of a pan, like meditation, like she's wondering who on earth would let Sam Fucking Winchester raise children.

"Once or twice a month, down to the junction. Railroad work's spotty, but it's enough. I, uh, I don't go with her." He clears his throat. As if it weren't obvious in his every gesture, he says it out loud: "I'm the one who stays home, holds down the fort. My dad wasn't ever around, and I wanted to do better, you know? And, uh, I use the kids being so young to justify it, but it's kind of like a phobia. I'm not... good with people any more."

He clears his throat. On the one hand, there isn't a way to say _I'm scared people will know it was me_. And on the other hand, Jo is one of a handful of people who know that already. It's present between them, and doesn't need be said. 

"I'm impressed," she comments after a while, and hands him the rinsed pan. "That you're okay with being in a city."

Sam inspects her profile, the neutral set of her chin. Low so that Dean won't hear, he tells her, "He doesn't ask me for much." 

That changes something in her, something that's a frown on her face but a loosening of her posture. "He asked?"

"Well. Showed up and told me where he was going. Which is _like_ asking."

Jo chuckles, as she's meant to. Sam hazards a glance over his shoulder in time to catch Dean raising his head, alert to the sound of her laughter. He would be so pleased to see them reconciled, or at least halfway friendly.

Sam is the one who fits in. He raises his eyes to the low ceiling and gathers himself up for an evening of funny stories. But he's out of practice, and has forgotten how that happens, how to turn a life into an anecdote. The kinds of stories he is used to telling are folk tales about what used to be, in front of a woodstove filled with hissing green pine sticks. "I'm --" he says, and doesn't know how to go on.

Jo doesn't look up. The pads of her fingers are beginning to wrinkle, and the hot water has her flushed pink up to the elbow. The mercy is obvious in her voice: "So tell me about her. Your wife."

"Her name's Rose." He blushes into the cupboards' forgiving plywood doors. "She's, I have a picture of her in my duffel bag --"

"Describe her," says Jo, and bends her attention to the next plate.

Sam thinks it over for a long moment. Dean might be listening in, or he might not be, or he might be pretending he's not. It's impossible to tell without looking over a shoulder and making sure he notices. "She's taller than you, by a couple of inches. Black hair, brown eyes, and thank goodness both girls have her nose. She likes smoked venison and she can shoot better than me and she feels sorry for spiders and won't let me kill them. I'm sorry, I suck at this."

Jo just says, "Go on," without giving away any clue of her reaction.

Sam takes a tablespoon from her and polishes it over and over while he talks. "She's got an older brother in Denver. I was scared she wouldn't get along with Dean, but she gets it. I think she didn't at first but then Maggie came along." In the middle of a sentence, Sam knows absolutely that Dean is paying attention, and might interrupt to object if Sam heads in the wrong direction. So it isn't that hard after all, to turn that weird tender event into a funny story: 

"So when she was pregnant with Maggie, Dean got it into his head that we needed a milk supply to make sure the baby didn't starve in winter. I guess he went with a goat because it was smaller; I don't think he was really looking forward to dragging a cow two miles uphill. So he comes up on a train from wherever, and walks out to the cabin from Manning in the middle of winter, had to have been two feet of snow on the ground, with a goat tied up in a duffel bag so only her head peeks out, and the bag never lost that smell. And he arrives after dark, and he's three days late, Maggie's already been born and Rose is back on her feet. She happens to be nearer the door when he pounds on it. It's after dark, and visitors late at night are always a bad sign. But Rose is pretty tough so she yanks the door open and in stumbles Dean half frozen, with this duffel bag, and it's _moving_ and making noises, and he's dropping snow all over everything and Rose's standing there in her housecoat and she realizes it's a _goat_ , a freaking _goat_ in a duffel bag, and she looks right at him and she says, 'What, no Frankincense?'"

In the other room, Dean cracks up. He laughs overloud in the little space, as if the joke weren't at his own expense, as if the context of the story weren't his low-grade dread that a baby might not get enough to eat. Jo is quiet at Sam's elbow, half a smile on her face, but not a laughing smile. The sink is empty, except for suds: they've finished the dishes without either of them noticing.

"How many goats do you have now?" she asks, low under Dean's wheezes.

"Seven," answers Sam, equally low. "And rabbits. Two mongrel puppies, that were supposed to be guard dogs but mostly spend their time having ribbons tied on their tails. He tried chickens once, but they pecked his hands and made a mess. They didn't do well in the altitude anyway, and never laid. One of them made a pretty good Thanksgiving dinner, though."

Jo turns away from the empty sink and leans on the counter. "Hungry, that first winter?"

At the table, Dean gives that noncommittal shrug of his. "Who wasn't?" he answers, as if he'd been part of this conversation all along. 

The only people Sam has met who didn't go hungry were the ones who looted Vail and Aspen. He can't remember whether he and Dean had thought it through, whether they'd ever discussed the idea that Daniel Elkins's old abandoned cabin would be stocked in grand paranoid fashion, or whether they'd just fled there on the unconscious assumption. A basement full of tuna fish and canned beans and pickles and elderly, wizened onions -- they'd been less hungry than most. Dean had shot a deer in February and crowed about his manly prowess till halfway through gutting the animal.

For the first time, Sam realizes that Alec went hungry that winter too, hungry and probably unsafe in all the rioting. Sam considers Jo's chapped, practical hands, and remembers that Seattle went under martial law that winter, and has been that way ever since.

"So," Dean says into the quiet, "You gonna tell how you scored a Canuck passport? They're impossible to forge, I've tried."

"My mom and me were in Michigan when it happened." She takes a breath and doesn't look at Sam. He twists the dish-towel in his hands, waiting. She shrugs. "We won the immigration lottery. Turns out Mom's grandfather was born in Saskatchewan. We made it in the first wave of refugees, before they closed the border."

Dean gives a slow whistle, as if the genuineness of the passport were all they're talking about. "So you're what, you're slumming on this side of the 49th parallel?"

She gives him the side-eye. "Yeah, I always did like the bad boys." They make faces at each other, Jo still by the sink and Dean at the table. It is astonishing how easy they've become with each other, compared to how they were when they were younger. She adds, "I have some kind of talent for it. Jenny's dad rolls in every couple of months, makes big promises, gets her hopes up, and then rolls right out again when I won't lend him any money." She shakes her head.

Sam knows the role he's supposed to play in this conversation. "So you're saying, it's good you and Dean never hooked up?"

"Hey," says Dean, with a smile bigger than simple teasing deserves. He is so pleased. Surely Jo can see it too, all over his face.

She laughs, and Sam can laugh, and it's a start. Jo stops laughing. "He's not a bad boy. Much. I mean, you're here, aren't you?" She wrinkles her brows at Dean, uncertain. "Even though Alec's a grownup."

"I'm not sure I'd call him a grownup," Dean answers. "But yeah, we're here."

"Any chance I could fool you into thinking you've got an eight-year-old daughter?" They chuckle together, rueful. "Yeah, guess that was a longshot."

"Ellen would kill me and brew beer outta my bones," he says.

"Your bones aren't good enough for beer. Hey, you want to lock up for me?" She begins to tidy the kitchenette's countertops, putting away the spices from dinner. "Andre the Giant here's gonna help me with the top shelves in the closet." Brisk, easy, Jo apportions out work like a boss -- she _is_ a boss -- and just as easily engineers a way to talk with Sam alone. He hides his dread, and after a glance in his direction Dean stands up.

"Yeah, okay. Have fun folding the sheets, ladies."

For once, Sam and Jo are on the same page: they give him the finger in unison. "Check the windows too," she calls after Dean as he goes.

She really does lead Sam to the closet, and points at a pile of towels out of her reach. Sam pulls them down two and three at a time and stacks them in Jo's ready arms. She is screwing herself up to ask, and Sam is screwing himself up to tell, and if Dean were to come charging in they'd probably both jump from the tension.

He lays another towel on the pile in her arms. They're threadbare, stiff and ragged at the edges, not at all the kind she keeps in the bathroom. He opens his mouth to say something and she beats him to it.

"So I know you can't fly." Her voice is flippant, like she's just curious. "So how'd you manage to set off the Pulse a hundred miles out over the Pacific?"

"I'm not the best person to ask," says Sam. There's a flutter of panic in his chest, but he keeps hold of it. "I don't remember a whole lot from right around then."

Jo drops the pile of towels on the floor. It flares her hair around her face, like a morning breeze. "Yeah, your brother's not telling, so you're all the witness I got."

"Uh. Okay. We were on Lassen Peak in California." It comes out of him slow like shame, and he speeds himself up. If he doesn't say it now, before Dean gets back, maybe he'll never be asked again. "I guess that was the spot where I was supposed to -- " He makes a vague gesture with his hand. "I was out of my head. Dean had to clock me to keep me from jumping off the nearest cliff."

He puzzles through his memory, through which parts are actual memories and which the comforting falsehoods Dean has told him over the years. It's not a story Sam has ever had to tell, or ever intended to tell. Even Rose: Dean told her, and he probably told her comforting falsehoods too. Jo waits for him to continue, her arms full of faded towels.

"The earth was shaking and there was steam bursting up in vents all over and Dean sat on me. I remember the grit of dirt against my teeth. The clouds were...swirly. It started to snow. It was June, ah, you knew that already. And then they clashed, and I mean, I can't fly, but obviously angels and demons can. Could. They were bright. And -- loud. They went away so fast there was a sonic boom and it knocked Dean off me. And then the sun rose in the west." Sam looks up, remembering that strange and terrible beauty like a fiery period at the end of an eons-long sentence, and realizes that on the back of the top shelf is a steel locker. It's the kind of thing you use to store ordnance. He lays the last towel in Jo's arms. "I don't remember anything else after that. Dean must have carried me down the mountain, because the next thing I know it's three days later and I'm in the back of the Impala and he's siphoning gas from an abandoned car."

Jo gazes on the worn towels in her arms as she absorbs the story he's told. Sam is expecting her to be angry when she raises her head, but her tone is still flippant when she says, "So what you're saying is, angels and demons are basically nuclear weapons." She sets down the second stack of towels and gestures for Sam to get the steel locker. 

"I guess," Sam says, yanking on the box. It's ridiculously heavy. He has no idea how she can have got it up there herself. "Or else nuclear weapons are as close to what they really are as we can measure, or understand." Jo is looking over his shoulder, expectant.

"Anyway," adds Dean, as he rounds the corner, "that was the end of it. I've tried all the mojo I know, and as far as I can tell there's no such thing any more."

Probably he heard the whole thing. Dean has never been above eavesdropping, especially when it comes to Sam, and cutting off a painful conversation is an exquisite art form for him. Because that _is_ the end of it, as far as he's concerned. He comes to Sam's side to pull down the locker and now they have something else to talk about. Together they lower their new topic to the floor.

Jo elbows them out of the way and unlocks the padlock. She lifts the lid and shows off her supplies, knives and handguns and sawed-off shotguns and a set of brass knuckles too big for Jo's own fist. It's like the trunk of the Impala used to be, only tidier. Sam has not looked at such an arsenal in a long, long time. 

"Not much call for holy water," she mutters, as if in apology for its absence. She doesn't keep any dried herbs either, and the locker is unmarked with wards or symbols. "Doesn't work too well on gangsters." Jo sifts through her weaponry, boxes of bullets taped tidily shut.

"Got a lot of that?" Dean asks, and watches as she pulls out a pair of handguns. They're modest weapons, smaller than average, one matte black plastic and the other a bright steel revolver. Sam is remembering the qualities of each, how much of a pain it is to take apart a semi-automatic for cleaning, when Dean abruptly chooses the revolver.

Matter-of-fact, Dean assesses the weapon in his hand. He breaks it open and thumbs at the empty chambers while Jo puts the other gun away. She comes up with a cartridge box and his answer at the same time: "Yeah, we got a lot of that."

She doesn't elaborate. Sam sits there on his knees in front of her in a stumped daze while she reaches across him to hand the box to Dean. He snaps the weapon closed and pockets it, and Sam realizes with dismay that it's for Alec.

"God," he breathes. "Is it that bad?"

"It's always that bad when you're hungry." Jo bends her head to re-locking her arsenal, the curtain of her hair concealing her expression. Sam doesn't need to see her face to know she is thinking about the people who came for Bobby. Sam doesn't need to see her, not when he's got Dean right next to him tense, with that horrible flinchy look to him, the one he puts away the second he realizes Sam is watching. Jo stands up, done with her weaponry for now. Her cheeks are smooth and her lips are firm. She does not look bitter at all. "My daughter's in Canada for a reason. I can afford to keep her up there, away from this city, I'm gonna."

"Good choice," Dean interjects, and he's standing too, back in control. Sam can't tell whether he's referring to the weapon for Alec or to the decision to send a child away. Sam is still crouched on the floor in front of the scratched-up locker, clearly too far out of the game to face this kind of conversation. It's not at all like taking potshots at coyotes from off the back porch, which is about all he's had to handle for the past ten years. He looks up at Dean and Jo, their calm and their latent violence, and is exhausted.

Jo adds, "We used to take the sewers, perfect routes all around the city for illicit merchandise. Can't even take those any more." She shakes her head. "Too many people got spooked, and we're up on the streets just like everybody else. It's hell on transport costs."

It is not difficult to imagine the benefits of a tunnel system virtually invisible and virtually abandoned, home and transport to anyone who will fight for it. Dragging himself to his feet, Sam wonders silently how desperate you have to be to decide to live in a sewer.

Jo is clearly thinking along the same track. "Could be anybody down there. Militants, steelheads, vigilantes, maybe even federales. Or a roving gang of giant raccoons." She makes a face and Sam makes a face with her. "Probably some kind of government bioengineering project gone wrong."

Dean snorts. "Seriously?"

"There's no conspiracy theory that hasn't proved true yet. I mean, when you know the Pulse was actually just a couple of idiot boys averting the apocalypse --"

The look on her face is unfazed, conciliatory. Sam gulps, and takes her ribbing as he's supposed to. "Hey."

"--Then a government plan to make human-sized backyard pests doesn't seem so weird, does it?"

He puts his hands in his pockets and stares down at the steel locker, full of hidden gleaming blades like claws. "I guess not."

*

Night fires aren't weird. It's been a long time since Seattle had a proper riot, but nothing says neighborhood intimidation like having your house burn down. And that's not even counting space-heater fires and shitty-wiring fires and fell-asleep-smoking fires and all the stupid, innocent reasons for things to burn. Still, it's not the kind of thing you just walk past. It's still something that deserves your attention.

Max isn't ready to have her good mood ruined. It's been a nice night, just her and the night air out on the town, and the warm motorcyle engine between her thighs makes a vigorous contrast to the sharp, acid chill of the air. She slows at first because she smells it, and worries a little bit that the gas tank has sprung a leak. But no: four blocks from her building, she brakes hard and comes to a stop. The street in front of her is on fire.

Big flames, tall, yellow-white, and they don't seem to care that the tarmac's a little shiny from the day's light rain. It's a narrow fire, which is weird, and Max puts down the kickstand for a look. If somebody in the neighborhood is burning black cats again --

It's not a black cat, in or out of a sack. It's a circle of fire in the middle of the street, and then she takes another step and feels the heat in her boots. It's a fire _below_ the street, so hot the tarmac radiates it upward, and the circle she's seeing is coming out of a manhole. Its iron rim glows an angry, dull orange. Max takes a couple of steps backwards.

If the fire were big enough, would the whole street melt and collapse and drop her into open flames? Maybe not, but what a stupid way to get yourself killed.

There's nobody there, that she can see. The night is quiet enough for any ordinary to hear that ugly chuckling noise, not quite a roar. Maybe it's not getting enough air to roar properly: the manhole might be its only clear source of oxygen. People live in the buildings on this street: six or eight squatter's colonies, a couple of old retail places reworked into extended-family settlements. If the fire spreads, or hell if the smoke has all the toxic crap that smoke usually has in it, everybody fronting the street is in danger. 

The manhole cover isn't right next to its hole. Max spins quickly and spots it on the broken sidewalk. At least with something strangling its air supply the fire will slow down, right? She isn't too confident about the fire hydrants having pressure in this neighborhood. She's crouched by the side of the road with a hundredweight of iron round in her hands, absolutely certain that the grime on its rim is ruining her biking gloves, when she glances over the haze of the heat radiating upward and realizes: smell of gasoline. 

This is no accident or electrical overload. (The power isn't even on at this hour of night, not in this sector.) This is a set fire, some genius totally trying to get them all killed. Sometimes Max hates her life.

She resigns herself to the grime all over her jacket and the thighs of her jeans as she maneuvers the manhole cover closer to its hole. Not so close she has to walk on the melty tar, and really, how do you put down a heavy object onto a space that's a thousand degrees Fahrenheit? If the heavy object isn't a frying pan with a really long handle. Sometimes it's nice being a mutant superhero: she tosses the manhole cover like a giant, ungainly frisbee towards its target.

It bounces, ugly clang in the night, and slides to occlude almost all of the hole. Only a few flames pierce the iron cover where it's got air-holes and in that tiny half-moon at its edge. It's fucking tiring sometimes, that sense of responsibility, but no more tiring than the idea of a hundred of her neighbors dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. With a sigh and a quick check of her pockets, she stalks toward the nearest fire hydrant with no tool more effective than a bottle opener.

With the fire at her back and the skinny moon nearly set, it's not easy to see fine detail in the darkness. The first thing she registers is that the storm drain grate positioned just under the hydrant is writhing, dark water boiling _up_ and away up the street. "Um," she mumbles to herself, mostly just to make a noise and make sure it's not a dream. Another step closer and her fine-tuned eyes make it out: those are rats. Big, healthy brown rats, pelts slicked and spiky, squirming and climbing all over each other in a frantic race out of the storm drain. They don't notice they've got an audience. They don't even squeak.

"This is not freaking me out," Max says aloud. And it's not. She isn't scared of rats. (She's scared of the idea of one of them getting tangled in her hair, okay, but that's all.) She knows how to handle herself. This is something she can handle. The hydrant in front of her is flaky with rust, its solid edges gone blurry like a picture out of focus. The fire is still crackling behind her.

It's while she's trying to turn hex bolts with her fingers -- and as strong as her hands are, they're really not shaped right for shifting rusted hex bolts -- that the culprit comes back to the scene of the crime. Max hears his shoes and melts into a shadow to her right. She tracks the heavy shape, man-shape, not some thrill-seeking teenager, as he steps out of a door in the building next to her. He stands there, just stands there in his sweatpants and a grimy unbuttoned shirt and looks at the low flames and the manhole cover red already from the heat underneath it, with a gas can in his hands.

Insurance fraud is the only thing Max can think of, and it makes her stalk forward on silent feet, the hydrant forgotten for now. She gets right up close behind the guy, close enough to tap him on the shoulder, and when he whirls in surprise she punches him in the jaw.

He's no tough guy. He goes down on his butt and the gas can rolls clattering away and she stares down at him. "What the fuck are you thinking," she demands, before she's even got a good look at his face. 

It's a familiar face. Not one she can put a name to, but somebody in the neighborhood. This is no distant landlord. He pops back up to his feet and gets right up in her grill, thick meaty nose and his slab of a forehead shiny with sweat. "Get out of here, girl. You don't got no right."

"Right?" she screeches, because at this point his neighbors _deserve_ to see this, and know what kind of monster --

"A man's got a right to protect his family," he thunders at her. If the light were brighter or the fire not behind him she would be able to say for sure that he was flushed red with anger. "You don't know. You don't even know." He waves his hands, fingers wide like shock rather than any coordinated movement. He doesn't attack -- because he recognizes Max, or because she's a girl, or because it's not her he's mad at.

Max doesn't care. "I know if the fire's still going when the power comes on tomorrow morning, we'll have manhole covers exploding all down the street like popcorn, is that what you're trying to do?"

"No!" He shouts in her face. His breath is terrible, but not boozy. "You didn't see! There was some kind of _thing_ in the sewer, I saw it. With my own eyes, honey, bigger than a fucking dog, the biggest rat you ever fucking saw, and I am not going to just wait around till it reaches out and snatches at my kid, okay?"

Some kind of creature in the sewer. Max feels the panic in her carotid pulse, in the flex of her knee tendons. "I'm not your honey," she retorts, because that's all she can think of to say.

Some kind of creature in the sewer. She doesn't have to ask him what it looked like, whether it was big enough to be a human but not shaped quite right. She and Alec have prowled the sewers before, over in Terminal City, and she knows who hides there. If Joshua didn't have a house to call his own, he'd probably be living in the sewer too.

"Do you have to burn down the whole neighborhood?" she asks, plaintive now. "I guarantee you melted all the wiring down there."

"I got a fire extinguisher," says the man, huffy. He's calming down without Max aggressive in his face. The certainty of his righteousness is in every line of his body. "It's only 14 years old. I been saving it for an emergency." And he pushes past her, back inside to his house, to his _family_ , that he thinks he's protecting. Max lets him go, and doesn't even bother trying to explain the difference between the sewer system and the underground electrical grid. He wouldn't care.

Max sags in the street and lets herself down to sit on the broken curb. The fire's lower than it was, maybe running out of fuel, but still too much for a single fire extinguisher. She hopes the guy has a wrench set to open the hydrant. She hugs her arms to her chest and feels the shape of her cell phone in her pocket and the urge to call somebody up is overwhelming. She doesn't even know what she'd tell, not here in the street with a righteous man most of the way through his little mutant-eradication program nearby. And anyway, it's two in the morning. Nobody she knows is awake, except maybe Alec.  
.  
Alec would make jokes about napalm. She cannot call Alec and expect to get a serious hearing on this or any other topic. She'll wait, and bring her concerns to Logan in the morning. He'll be able to look at the problem from a distance, and come up with a plan. 

The man comes bustling out of his door with a fire extinguisher in one hand and a full bucket in the other. Tiny splashes fall from the bucket's edge with his every step: at least he's not completely out of his head. If he's got a second bucket, Max will jump right in and start a bucket brigade and this stupid fire will be out before dawn. After all, fire is something you know is a threat, right? It could have been worse: he could be setting out food laced with rat poison.

*

It doesn't take long for Alec to discover where the Winchesters are staying. He follows them home, to a dingy apartment building. Their names aren't on the name plates in the lobby -- any of their names, real or fake -- but one of the name plates says J. H., and Alec puts two and two together. Jo Harvelle, the smuggler. All the rest is waiting till everyone leaves in the morning, so he can break in without incident.

The lock isn't much, but the deadbolt takes some finesse. He opens the door and sets off a cascade of falling paperback books that scatter all over the floor. They don't make a lot of noise, but there's no hope he'll be able to stack them back in the same order they were before. Alec does it anyway, dogged, smirking at the lurid romance covers. They are decidedly not books that the Winchesters are likely to read.

The whole apartment is like that. There are curtains on the kitchenette windows, that match the color of the potholders. The bathroom is full of fluffy towels and bottles that smell feminine. In the bedroom, one large bed, neatly made, with lots of pillows. Alec snoops in the bedside table and finds condoms, an expensive brand. He steals two, and rearranges the rest so that their absence won't be noticed.

The pictures on the bedside table don't reveal a boyfriend. They're all framed, and all of a little girl with dark brown hair. In a pink snowsuit, in a sweater with leaves stuck all over it, hoisted over Jo's shoulder and screaming with laughter. Jo and the little girl look so much alike. Alec wastes a few moments wondering whether it's her kid sister or her daughter, or just some stranger kid, just some random person off the street. He catches himself at it and turns away from the pictures in disgust.

The only trace of Winchester presence in the whole place is a pile of gray-green fabric in the front room. Alec rifles through it and sorts out two bedrolls and two duffel bags, alike in every way, each half-full. It is not difficult to tell that the one with a leather-bound notebook full of photos nestled on top of carefully-darned socks belongs to Sam; in the other, the socks have holes in the toes and imported candy bars hidden inside. Alec grabs a couple of the candy bars, and tucks them into his jacket pocket.

He sits on the floor to snoop through the photos. They are every size, some glossy and some dull with age. Twenty of them appear to have been taken at the same time, of a young couple posing with their two kids in front of a house; and then singles here and there. A little square picture with a white border on strange thick paper, of a dark-eyed woman staring into the camera, her gaze that kind of intense that Alec recognizes, fearfully, as love. Several of Sam as a child, hair in his eyes, making impudent faces. Alec hits on a photo of Dean, taken in profile with its subject unawares. If he didn't know better, even he would have agreed it was a picture of himself.

He is still intent on that photo when the Winchesters let themselves back in. Alec just has time to startle and reach unconsciously for the teetering stack of books, but there is some trick to it, and Dean pushes the door open without knocking the romances over. Sam, behind him, stops in his tracks, but Dean's surprise is the smallest hitch in his stride as he walks into the room. Sam shuts and locks the door behind them.

"Hi, Alec," he says, apprehensive.

Dean throws himself into one of the two chairs in the room. It is obvious that Jo does not usually have this many visitors. Sam takes the other chair, and there is no seat for Alec. He scrambles to his feet, so that when he speaks at least he is not looking up at them.

"Any questions I can answer about those pictures?" Dean asks. The casual tone of his question is a little bit forced, but only a little bit.

It would be bad to wrinkle the photo paper with too tight a grip. Alec shrugs as if he doesn't care and asks, "Who's this woman?" It is one of the series of twenty. She is a lovely blonde, hair flying in a summer wind.

"That's our mother," Sam tells him, even. "Your grandmother. She died not long after those photos were taken."

The woman Dean looks like. Alec studies it for a moment and can see the resemblance, around the mouth and chin. Same as his own mouth and chin, same pale freckled complexion. Sam has her eyebrows. "And this?" He holds out the woman in the square picture.

This time Sam's response is warm: "That's my wife, Rose. She's back in Colorado."

"Oh." Alec shuffles the pile and comes up with a tiny black and white snapshot of a man in a t-shirt. He is skinny, barely an adult, and looks almost but not quite like Sam. "And this?"

Sam and Dean share a glance, that has Sam look away in sorrow and Dean break out into a little smile. "Dad ran away and joined the Marines when he was seventeen. That's him."

Galvanized, Alec asks too quickly, "He was in the military?"

Dean takes a long, thoughtful moment before answering. "Kid, everybody was in the military back then. For like forty years, every guy was drafted into uniform. That ended a long time ago."

"Why?"

Dean rolls his eyes over to Sam, and Sam supplies the answer: "It's complicated. There were a couple of undeclared wars. It was about eternal vigilance."

"I meant," corrects Alec, "why did it end?"

"Turns out soldiering's not for everybody," Dean tells him. "Sam sure as hell would have sucked at taking orders."

He and Sam share a laugh at that. Alec watches them, tense, and slowly they come out of it and sit quietly with still faces. They are not shy about observing his unease.

It's in that silence of examination that Dean makes his strike: "So she was obviously white. Your mother, I mean."

He leans back in his chair, lifting the front legs an inch or two. His face goes to something far away, some memory or imagination that he doesn't share. Sam watches him as closely as Alec does, and frowns. 

Dean goes on: "You got a little Canada in the way you talk, but I've never been over the border. So she was from a northern state."

Alec sweats where he stands and says nothing.

"You were born blond, am I right?" Dean scratches at his scalp casually and Alec has to control himself not to mimic that gesture. "And got darker as you grew up, yeah, me too. So she was probably blonde, or close enough. Funny, cause I usually go for brunettes. It's a thing. She have freckles?"

Sam chuckles a little. "I think that's all you, dude."

"And blue eyes," Dean adds. "Mister Wizard over here says your mother didn't have brown eyes, or else you would too."

" _Probably_ not," Sam corrects, and gets an irritated handwave in return. He explains, "You remember fifth grade biology, and the whole thing with attached earlobes and widow's peaks?"

"Dude," Dean objects, before Alec can even begin to think up a good lie. "School was probably cancelled on account of apocalypse."

"Oh." Sam is abashed. He looks to Alec for permission to continue. It's weird, that sudden power over the course of the conversation. Alec gives him a nod. "Well anyway, in school you would have learned about dominant traits like widow's peaks, and you would have learned that brown eyes are dominant and blue and green are recessive. But it's not actually that simple -- eye color is polygenic, or else there'd be no such thing as hazel. Most of the time, though, brown wins out. Both my daughters are brown-eyed."

The light from the far window doesn't strike them directly, but it provides enough illumination to see the Winchester brothers' faces clearly. Their eyes are pale, like their dead mother in the pictures: Sam's closer to her blue, a hazy grayish color like algae, and Dean's bright green. Just like the color Alec looks at in the mirror every morning. Not kinda-sorta close: the same, down to the brass-colored speckling of the iris.

"So even though they got blue-eyes genes from me, their mother's genes are what show." Sam smiles to himself, something affectionate. "There's a lot more inside them than ever shows up on the outside. It's like secret family lore."

They are looking at him, at his face, at his obvious Winchester features. They just _know_ , they just do, and their certainty fills the room. Alec is open-mouthed, photos still in his hands. "I --"

"Wendy in Montana." Dean's gaze is attentive, undemanding. "Wendy, or Wanda, or Gwen. I only knew her for a weekend and I never saw her again after that. Small town, north of Bozeman, I forget what it was called. I was twenty, so the timing's right. She was older than me, just a year or two. I'm sorry, I don't remember her last name, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't McDowell."

The pause lasts forever. Alec works his mouth and struggles to respond. Sam is still in reverie, while Dean teeters on the back legs of his chair with ease. 

"It's a guess. But I'm a pretty good guesser."

The certainty is convincing, seamless. Alec observes their serene faces. They are irresistible. At last his shoulders fall and he mumbles, "...How'd you know?"

The smiles on Winchester faces are like suns, like day. "Awesome powers of recall," Dean croons to himself.

"Do you still keep in touch with her?" asks Sam. Alec is coming to recognize his curiosity. 

He shakes his head automatically. He is scrambling already, working at the story that will fit their needs. He has only the fragments of stories he's heard around Jam Pony to guess at how ordinaries move away from their parents. Both Winchesters are observing him with a dreadful seriousness that Alec can't interpret.

"She was nice," Dean says after a moment. "I liked her. I know I left her my phone number, but she probably lost it. If she's dead, I'm sorry for it."

Alec stands there with his mouth hanging open. He has never cared about dead strangers before. "I've been on my own for a while," he evades.

"Man, I wish I'd known." Dean shakes his head. Sam is looking at his brother carefully now. "I'd have come and got you, when it all went down. You ought to have had somebody to protect you." The sentence ends fierce, through teeth.

Afraid of that emotion, Alec turns abruptly and puts down the photos on a table. Some knickknacks topple under his unsteady hands. And then Dean is there, they both are, the Winchesters standing and crowding into Alec's space. Dean puts his hand on Alec's shoulder, a steady grip. There is no deceit or uncertainty in his face.

"I'd have come and got you," he says again. He has only to tug a little bit and Alec succumbs. The arms across his back are powerful, certain. Alec tucks his face into the shoulder of a stranger and inhales a weirdly familiar scent. "Hey, kid. Hey, kid." Dean mumbles, and the vibration of it carries throughout his body.

The lie comes to Alec's lips as if he had been practicing it. "Dad," he breathes, and the arms squeeze him tighter.

*

The day isn't anywhere near over enough and Max has been back and forth across the city twice for some bonehead with legal papers and a tendency to typoes, and she is so not in the mood. She's swerving past a cop car that doesn't believe in sidewalks when she glimpses Alec up ahead of her, two Alecs -- she shudders and remembers that creepy old guy who wears Alec's face. She leans into her turn and is out of their eyeline.

She doesn't get far. Her fingers close around the brakes and the bike slows to a stop and she puts down a foot in the street. Curiosity... cat... yeah. She turns around and sidles back, walking her bike.

It's not too hard to observe them from afar. They're standing on the stoop of an apartment building: a legal one, the kind where mail still sometimes gets delivered without a charming and helpful Jam Pony messenger to deliver it. Alec has finally found a tribe of people who talk as much with their hands as he does. They are laughing together, Alec and Geezer Alec and Guy Smiley. Geezer Alec is telling a funny story and Alec's face is rapt, genuine. It curdles Max for a reason she doesn't understand, to see him like that.

After a nice laugh, they start to break up: Guy Smiley bangs on Alec's shoulder like he wants to hug the guy but doesn't dare, and then Geezer Alec cuffs him on the back of the head and then they're off down the street away, brisk. Alec watches them go with a smile, not his I-cheat-at-cards smile or his a-pretty-face-gets-you-in-anywhere smile, but something weird and mushy.

Max is rapidly losing her shit at him, and he doesn't even know she's there. She locks up her bike and marches down the block and into his personal bubble.

"We have to talk," she commands, and digs a fist into his collar. "Now."

He registers only a moment of surprise, and then layers that over with his patented brand of smarm. "Yes, ma'am," he chirps. He leads her away from the building; maybe there's somebody still inside he doesn't want seeing stuff. "I didn't know you felt that way about me, Max."

But he doesn't walk away or try to have this argument in the street. He pushes her into a convenience store down the block and crowds into the frozen foods aisle with her and doesn't even object when she gets all up in his face. "So tell me about those guys," she asks.

"What guys?" Alec shows his teeth, and she smacks him. He relents: "Oh, those guys. What the hell, they want to think I'm related to them, who am I to get in the way of a family reunion?"

"What in the _hell_ are you doing."

Alec tries to back away, but the aisle isn't that wide. She shifts with him, and keeps him trapped. He is tall enough he can just raise his chin and avoid her eyes. "Nothing," he says, the petulant little twerp.

Cat burglary this isn't. The net worth of a couple of guys who mend their own jackets is pretty low. "So you're going to pull a scam?" Max demands.

"Pull? Are you kidding?" Alec's grin is astounded, energized. "They put it all together themselves and dropped it in my lap. They _want_ to be scammed, lady. I am doing them a _favor_."

"Listen, you idiot," Max has no idea how to explain it, if he doesn't get it himself. She's scammed a lot of people, but not like this. "I don't like them any more than you do, but this is a whole new low --"

A quelling hand on her shoulder, Alec shifts them a little further down the aisle and out of the view of the clerk at the counter. He opens one of the freezers, grabs a pair of individually-wrapped empanadas. Their plastic crackles and crinkles over the stiff doughy shapes.

He tosses one of them to her. "Did you get a look at the older one? He's right, you know." His mouth widens into a grimace, and he taps himself on the nose with a corner of plastic. "We look too much alike. It isn't a coincidence."

That face. Max can look at him and layer onto him the changes age will make. She feels like crying. It isn't a coincidence.

She hardens her voice and shoves the frozen thing in her hand at him. "Oh, so now you believe it too?"

"They had to get the DNA from somewhere, right?" He shrugs. He takes both empanadas and puts them back into the freezer, as if they're talking about delivery routes, as if this is all perfectly normal. "They sampled this guy, who knows when, and when they decided to make their little science experiments look human, they went with what they already had on hand."

"That's ridiculous," she says.

"That's government efficiency," Alec rejoinders. He opens his hands, _ta-dah_ , as if Max is supposed to clap for him. "And that means I'm even closer to him than his own kid. I'm him. I'm his clone. Just with a few cooler accessories he doesn't need to know about."

Max doesn't know what to say. Government efficiency: like how Alec had an identical twin, and Max probably has one too. Why make one super-soldier when you can make two at a time? She tracks the satisfaction in his face, and the way he turns away as if the conversation were over. He is contemplating a sack of gum drops when she finally musters, "And you think that makes it okay?"

He spins to face her, smirky. "Okay? I freaking deserve it."

"Alec," she mumbles, "don't."

"Max. It works." He grasps her by the shoulders, like a coach giving a pep-talk. "Being a Winchester is perfect cover for me, it makes them happy, and if it ends up they express their family support in thousands and thousands of dollars, even better."

"But it isn't fair."

"It's better than fair." Alec grins beatifically, and goes back to the gum drops. "We all get what we want."

He gets all the way to the counter and pays for his candy, Max dumb at his heels, before any inkling of her dismay gets through. He pokes through a handful of change and sneaks glances at her, his face getting longer. Outside, in the afternoon haze, he offers her a gum drop and she takes it mechanically.

"I could say you're my sister or something," he says at last. "I mean, you know, if you wanted."


	3. The Short End of the Y-Chromosome

He takes the kid up on the roof of Jo's building, in the end. It seems like a safe enough space to mess around in, and Alec is a little paranoid about public places. And it turns out that the YMCA has just the one office in Seattle these days, and has replaced its gym with a full-time soup kitchen. So the roof it is.

Dean circles his son, hands out, alert for an opening. They've gotten past the awkward chuckles of wrestling somebody who wears your own face, and have settled into an athletic rhythm. The kid has at least a little experience, and can see a weight-shift coming: so he's not completely helpless. He likes to bounce and smirk, waiting, as if he's never lost a fight, and that's a lesson he definitely needs to learn. Dean eyeballs potential attacks low and to the right, and then throws himself at Alec on the left instead.

There's an instant in the middle there where Dean catches the look on the boy's face and thinks _gotcha_ , but as soon as the thought forms he discovers Alec has pivoted neatly, leaned back on one heel, and let his father miss him entirely. Even considering Dean's over forty, the kid's reflexes are _unreal_.

"Good recovery," Dean tells him, panting on the tarred roof. "But you fell for it in the first place."

"That thing with your eyes?" Alec laughs. He balances on his toes in the westering sun. "That was a trick?"

"Trick enough." Dean shakes his head at the youthful enthusiasm on display. "Speed isn't always going to cover you, kid. You've got to be thinking all the time." He reaches out and pokes Alec in the forehead with a finger, affectionately, but as he does it he watches Alec watch him, sees the threat-assessment and the relaxation as the boy allows himself to be touched. "And work on that poker face."

Alec grins at him. "You wanna try again?" 

"Not really."

They take a break then, or Dean does, to wipe the sweat off his forehead with his discarded flannel shirt. It's late in the day, as warm as it'll get for midwinter, and both of them have red ears and fingertips. Alec steams faintly in his short sleeves, and even his smell says Winchester.

"I shoulda told you," says Alec after a moment. "I made a little money last summer on the bare-knuckles boxing circuit." His voice is trying for casual and informative, but the boast in it is all over his face. He stands there, at rest for once, and under Dean's gaze his smile begins to wilt.

"But not any more?" Dean asks stiffly. 

Shy, Alec shakes his head.

"Good. You need money, you come to me." Dean discovers his heart is racing. He stuffs his hands into his pockets rather than let the kid see he's made fists. But it's too late, and Alec backs up one wary step. Dean tries again: "No need to mess up that pretty face."

Jokes are something Alec can do. He smiles as he's supposed to, and lets Dean jostle him. 

"That where you got your tattoo?" 

Alec puts a hand to his neck, pale. Maybe Dean wasn't supposed to notice it, although it's right there below his hairline, like he's a soup can in a grocery store. He blinks a few times before answering: "Did time in a steelhead gang."

"What, those creeps downtown with the nails stuck in their noses?" Those creeps downtown that Alec beat the crap out of, according to his little bicycling pal.

"Yeah." Alec's tone is neutral, formal. "I got over it."

It is clear that Alec is a terrible liar. Obviously he must take after Sam. Dean decides to be merciful and changes the subject.

"Now, when I learned to fight, my dad was twice my size." He says it as casually as he can, and pretends not to notice Alec's hungry attention. "I was ten and I got into some kind of scrape and he looked at me one day and took me out back and taught me how to take care of myself. You learn against somebody who can pick you up and throw you around the room, you learn to fight smart."

"What kind of scrape?" asks Alec.

"Don't remember. Something at school, some bigger kid picking on me or something. It wasn't just the one thing, he just decided I was old enough to learn everything. He'd let me around an air rifle since I was six, but that summer he started me on handguns. Gave me a knife for my eleventh birthday." Dean can't help the grin on his face. He is thinking about the weapon Jo gave him, what it'll be like to hand it over to Alec.

The boy's fascination is a little glassy, as if it's not sinking in. He doesn't ask any more questions, though. It's time for another lesson.

"You know how to defend yourself against a dude with a knife?"

"I don't --"

And they're off again, pacing each other. The balance has shifted, though: Alec backs away, frowning, while Dean feels him out. Two stiffened fingers fill in for a real knife, and Dean only has to lunge at him once before the kid figures out a good blocking move. They play one another back and forth in the long shadows, Alec warming to it slowly, and Dean taps him on forearm and shoulder and once on the top of his ear. 

"I don't think you're taking this knife seriously," Dean teases him.

"I don't think you really want me to disarm you," Alec teases back. They grin at each other, and pause for breath.

"Yeah, okay." Dean goes hunting in his flannel shirt and comes up with the real McCoy, a switchknife as old as he is. Alec sees it and shifts into a mode he hasn't shown at all yet. He doesn't bounce on his toes any longer but glides, bent forward a little, hyperfocused, all pretense and attitude gone. Like a stoat at a rabbit hole, and for the first time Dean isn't afraid of this silly innocent kid getting himself killed in a barfight. He tells his son: "This is sharp, so I'll keep it closed."

As soon as the last word is out of his mouth, Alec is on the attack. He shows no sign of caution for the thing in Dean's hand, just rampages across the space between them like a maniac. Dean swings at him once, connects pretty hard, and after that he's on his back with an insane teenager straddling his chest and snatching at his hand. Alec yanks back his father's middle finger hard enough to sprain it, and Dean lets go. The closed knife never even has the chance to hit the ground: Alec catches it in midair.

"Mine," he gloats, and gets up off Dean like he's harmless, like they've just been playing around.

Slow and not a little sore, Dean sits upright, and hauls himself to his feet. "Jesus Christ, kid." He reaches out for Alec's arm, slow and obvious, in case he's still in attack mode. In the thickest part of his right biceps, the telltale imprint of the knife's handle glows angry red. "You're goddamned lucky I kept that thing closed."

Alec shrugs. He tosses the knife to his other hand and thumbs the switch. The blade flies open, a-gleam in the late daylight, while Dean glowers and rubs at the mark on the boy's arm. It'll bruise, that's all.

"I won, didn't I?" Alec is impervious to Dean's anger. Usually he is so aware of mood and tone, squirrelly, but now he doesn't care. It's a little scary.

"I'm not sure it's winning if your opponent stabs you in your dominant arm," Dean explains wearily.

But Alec will not understand. "It'd heal quick enough. And, I mean, I got the knife."

He has the knife. Dean turns away and decides that the setting sun is low enough for an excuse to end the session. He scoops up his flannel shirt and shakes it out to put it back on. The wind's picking up, sharp and chill. He shudders involuntarily, lets it pass through him and fade away. Alec has only just twigged to the fact he's not going to get to show off any more, not today. He slumps his shoulders with an exaggerated pout, but it doesn't last. With neat efficiency he folds the knife shut again, and pockets it. He is ready to go before Dean has figured out the buttons on his shirt.

That smile is charming, tactless, self-satisfied. Dean doesn't remember using that smile on his own father, because he's sure he would remember the smack he'd deserve for it. He has no idea how to tell a kid who thinks he's indestructible about the _really_ killer creatures on this earth.

Dean snakes an arm all the way around his son's neck, and holds onto him tight. He's close enough to say it into Alec's ear: "I got a lot to teach you, kid. It's my job to keep you safe. That's what dads do."

Alec stiffens at once and pulls away. He keeps his back to Dean, so the expression on his face doesn't give away whether he's scared or confused or mad. Dean just stands there to give him a minute to pull himself together. And he does: he squares his shoulders and when he turns again he's got his smirk in place, confident little jerk.

They head for the stairwell and Dean lets him race ahead, bounding down the stairs like he's got someplace he needs to be.

*

"So, okay. Ghosts or monsters?"

Dean is leaning against a concrete pylon, tossing peanuts in the air and catching them in his mouth. Sam has been watching him in bafflement for a good ten minutes before he realizes the likelihood that Dean is aping -- and trying to outdo -- behavior he has watched in Alec. Dean doesn't even like peanuts that much, not without beer.

"Ghosts," Sam says, definite. "More of an existential hit, less of a reality-bender." He crosses his arms against the cold mist.

They are standing on the walkway of a dis-used and padlocked park facing the Sound, loitering like crooks, while somewhere on the water Jo pilots a rowboat full of contraband. They don't even know what contraband, just something vaguely illegal (but not, she promised, dangerous) that brings in a pretty penny on the black market. Sam is not currently clear on what other kinds of markets there are besides the black market; even mechanical cash registers appear to be a thing of the past, and sales tax is laughable. He hasn't gone into the nicer sectors of town yet so he doesn't know how luxuries are bought and sold. Probably not out the back of a rowboat, though.

Rare splashes slap unseen against the concrete: the sea is calm. In the twilight and the fog, visibility is terrible.

"You think so?" Dean asks. "I was gonna say a nice monster-hunt would ease him into it. You know, just some crazy asshole with wiggly antennas, just your run-of-the-mill nuclear-accident mutant killer. Can't be all that weird, considering."

Sam gives an irritated snort. "Spoken like a man who fathered his only child before the Pulse."

"Seriously though." Dean throws a peanut at him. "What's gonna freak you out more, a slightly weirder version of cops-and-robbers, or shaking up your whole idea of how the world works? Anyway, I mention ghosts he's gonna be thinking about his mother."

"He didn't say she was dead."

"He didn't say he'd had a shitty childhood either. Did I mention I'm a good guesser?"

The water near the shore glints with swirls of oil. Dull yellow foam flecked with trash floats gently to and fro. "Don't push him," Sam blurts, and is surprised at himself. He hadn't know he was thinking it till he said it. "We don't know what he'll do."

Dean has a funny look on his face. "Dude, you do not understand how much I'm not pushing him right now."

There is nothing Sam can say to that. A decade and change of Dean sowing his wild oats before the Pulse, and it's kind of a miracle there aren't more children in the world with his face. He's not wrong: it makes him look like an asshole. He's not wrong: to recite the details of his conquest to the product of it would be cruel. With only a few days' acquaintance, Alec is still too much a mystery to go blundering around in potentially painful territory. Sam is about to wonder whether introducing him to the hunt at all is a mistake, when he hears the weird muffled echo of a human voice.

"That'll be Jo," Dean says with a smile. He tosses aside the last of the peanuts and wipes his hands on his jeans. Together he and Sam pace up and down the walkway, peering into the gloom.

They don't have long to wait. The muffling effect of the fog has disguised her approach till she's nearly alongside, seated at the front of the boat while one of her people pulls at the oars. Her hair flicks around her shoulders as she waves a flashlight at her unloading crew. Sam squirms at the seaweed slime on the line she throws him. She ties up her little boat, cleating the lines with easy efficiency, and pulls off her black knitted cap. 

"Fucking cold out there," she mumbles to herself, and then turns briskly to business.

The Winchester brothers unload boxes from the boat, over the iron railing and into stacks on the concrete. They aren't heavy, the tap of plastic-on-plastic within. "We allowed to ask?" Dean says with a smirk.

"Sure," Jo tells him, and ignores his offered hand to clamber by herself up onto dry land. "Tryptophan. Most lucrative thing I can move right now, at the lowest risk."

The boxes stack pretty high. Sam has no idea how they're going to get all of this stuff onto two motorbikes. "What's tryptophan?" he asks, over his shoulder.

"Some kind of nutritional thing. Macrobiotic or vegan or some kind of fad diet. Demand just spiked in the past couple of months." Jo shrugs her shoulders, trim in her black jacket and dark jeans. The life of a smuggler has been good for her. She unties the cleated line and throws it back to her man in the boat. "Okay, Abe. See you at the warehouse tomorrow."

They stand side by side, one-two-three facing the quiet water, and the rowboat slowly glides away without Abe ever having said a word. It's possible he didn't even change facial expressions.

Dean puts a hand to the back of his head, like he's thinking through something very serious. "So what you're saying is, you're smuggling Flintstones vitamins."

The sound of laughter in the thick air is intimate, as if they were in a small closed room instead of outside. Jo laughs like somebody who has learned with great difficulty to laugh at herself. "If I could make a profit off teddy bears, I'd be smuggling them instead."

Sam chuckles at this economics lesson while the three of them shlep stacks of boxes back towards the chain-link fence that declares this waterfront park off-limits. It's not even well-maintained chain-link; they don't even have streetlights. The cops on Jo's take stay bought, or anyway they do when it's only vitamins.

Beyond the fence, tucked into a shaggy hedge, the cooking-oil motorbikes await. It turns out that it really is possible to bungee ridiculous numbers of boxes onto the back of a bike, if you work at it. They hang down on either side of the rear wheel and loom five feet high on the rack, secured with cords. It can't be fun to transport goods this way on a windy day, but it's quiet and it's far enough that walking would take all night. Dean stands up, satisfied with the hold on those boxes, and glances between Jo and Sam, eager.

"I'll take this one," Sam volunteers, his head still full of the horrors of Dean Winchester's Evel Knievel impression.

Jo laughs. "You will, will you?" and Dean laughs along with her.

"You barely made it here without wiping out, dude." Dean's voice is sharp, but he slaps Sam on the arm to show he doesn't mean it. "Get on in back of me."

On her motorbike, jacket collar at her long white neck, Jo is like a cyberpunk icon of old. She slips on a pair of clear glasses and sets her wrists on the handlebars as easy as you please. It is with amusement that she waits for Sam and Dean to arrange themselves properly on the other bike.

It's not actually a bike meant for two. Sam can't find a spot to rest his feet that doesn't leave a hard knee in Dean's back, resulting in an elbow in Sam's face. The engine flares to life and Dean settles on the handlebars (and really, he does look like he belongs there; probably he practices that pose in a mirror to get it just right), and all Sam can do is bend his knees and curl his ankles, feet dangling toward the pavement. The memory is as sudden as it is powerful: of riding on the back of Dean's bicycle when they were children, Dean standing on the pedals and Sam with his feet in the gravel as the wheels spun. They got around a lot that way, summers when they were kids. It was easier to steal one bike than two.

They ride into the night. Sam sets a hand on his brother's shoulder, that's all, just a signal that he hasn't fallen off. The wind riffles through their hair, cold, clear. Ahead of them, Jo's hair streams behind her like a yellow flag. No more than twenty miles an hour, nothing compared to what the Impala can do, but it's thrilling, thrilling, like being awake again after a long sleep. Sam had forgotten this pleasure. They get where they're going and kill the engines and it's too soon.

Sam puts his feet back down on the mundane ground. His head still wrapped up in movement, he blurts: "Are we gonna tell Alec about how I almost accidentally blew up the universe?"

Dean answers with an elbow in the ribs. "No, we are not gonna tell Alec about how we almost accidentally blew up the universe. What is wrong with you!" He shoves the motorbike up onto its kickstand with more force than is strictly necessary and Sam bangs into the crates so hard they almost topple.

Jo watches them both with a strange expression on her face, like maybe she wants to laugh but is appalled at the same time.

"We've got to tell him the truth," Sam protests, dully.

"Yeah," Dean retorts, "I'm starting to understand why Dad always kept us in the dark."

"Dude. That drove you nuts." Sam climbs off the motorbike and unkinks his back. There's only a little bit of gravel in his shoes, not enough to take them off and shake out the pebbles. "I mean, it drove me nuts, but that's not saying much. It drove _you_ nuts."

They unload the bikes in silence while Jo unlocks the warehouse door. "Well," Dean says to himself, "at least this way he doesn't know he's in the dark, right?"

"You're not that good a liar," Jo interjects. She is a study of contrasts, her hair gone silver in the hazy cool light. "You'll have to tell him eventually."

"Well sure," says Dean. He sounds casual. Sam's heart pounds for no reason. "Once he's got the basics down."

"Oh god," grumbles Jo. "You're gonna send him on a monster-hunt?"

The suspense Sam feels ought to be ridiculous. Of course Dean will send him on a monster-hunt: the perfect father-son bonding moment. Even so, Sam stands there hoping his brother will say no.

"Kid needs some direction in his life. He listens to rap, for crying out loud." Dean shakes his head, brows furrowed. "You could fit two of him in those ridiculous jeans he wears."

Jo cracks up, her laughter so powerful it doubles her over. She puts a hand onto one of the boxes of pills to steady herself. Sam feels the impulse to laugh in his ribs, but can't follow it through with any breath.

"What," says Dean, and unloads another box.

*

Crash is _her_ place, the place she first dragged people to, and she shouldn't have to be wary when she goes there. Max is sitting at a table with Cindy, explaining about how men (actually, Logan) really are that pathetic, when she realizes she doesn't have an audience any more. Mouth open, OC is staring at the stairs in disbelief.

The special guest for our show tonight is Geezer Alec, hipshot on the steps and surveying the crowd below him with a squint. The posture and the uncool clothes would give away the fact he's not the real Alec, even if his face didn't. He settles his eyes on Max, nods his head, and starts on down the stairs. Max reaches across the table and pushes Cindy's mouth closed with a fingertip. After a moment, that blank surprise changes to something else, and Cindy's lips turn up in a sly smile. She watches Geezer Alec watch her as he approaches. He makes eye-contact with Cindy, and waggles his eyebrows like he thinks he's going to score.

He pulls up a chair and turns it backwards and sits on it a-straddle, as if that makes him more manly or something. His shoulders hunch as he rests his forearms on the table. "How we doing tonight, ladies?" he asks. If he'd winked, Max is sure she would have hit him.

"What the hell do you want," she demands, just as Cindy is asking,

"This what Alec look like when you don't wash him on delicate cycle?"

Geezer Alec is stung, sits up straighter. "Dean Winchester," he says, pointedly. And then it's coming, that little upturn at the corner of his mouth, Max knows it, and he opens his mouth and it's here: "I'm Alec's dad."

"Really." Cindy's disbelief is masterful. The crinkly little smile falls right off this Winchester guy's face.

"Really," he repeats, annoyed. "What, you don't see the resemblance?"

Max cuts in."This is my bar."

"Good thing I came to find you, then." The guy settles his arms and gives Max his aging good looks and just eyes her, just Alec's eyes only not half as clueless. It's a little creepy. "It's okay to talk in front of your lady-friend here?"

The richness of Cindy's laughter can fill in a lot of tense silences. "Original Cindy," she declares, and flattens her palm over her copious cleavage. "I don't believe we've had the pleasure of being introduced till now."

"Yeah?" he asks. His transition to friendly curiosity is smooth. "You Alec's girlfriend?"

Oh, she totally set him up for that one. "Old man," she explains, pity all over her face, "Alec's girlfriends cheat on him with me." Max slaps her five, the grin painful on her face. Winchester doesn't seem to think it's funny.

"Okay, this old thing is ridiculous." He shakes his head, forehead wrinkled up in outrage. "I just turned forty-two, and seriously? That's nothing. My dad could kick ten kinds of ass at fifty, and if he'd lived --" He's pointing with a finger, ridiculously bossy, but then he looks at the table and shuts up and doesn't say what his dad would have done if he'd lived to be even older than fifty.

His dad would be Alec's grandfather. If he'd lived, he'd be _seventy_ or something. Well, at least he's dead already. Max doesn't like to think about all the other people affected by Alec's scam.

"So what do you want," she asks, meaner than she intends to.

He hunches in, forearms on the table, his anger forgotten. "I'm trying to make sure Alec's got a head on his shoulders, that he's gonna survive this shithole, or else I'm gonna take him back with me to Colorado." 

It is weird, how he sets one thing aside and starts in on something different. It's tidy, like a too-small closet. "So," Max mumbles, slow, "so how come you're asking me?"

Winchester breathes out through his nose. "Word is, you're the one who would know. You keep an eye out for him."

He doesn't blink. Cindy is making the universal signal for _You want me to get this jerk thrown out?_ with her right hand, so Max will see it and he won't. He still doesn't blink. Max shudders away from his face; he is too intense, too dogged. He is too much like --

"I don't do anything for Alec," she protests. "He's a stupid jerk, but he's not helpless."

"I get the feeling he doesn't know a hell of a lot about the world though, am I right? He's kinda -- naive."

Cindy breaks in: "Oh, he only got the _face_ of an angel." Winchester startles a little and then pretends he didn't. "You run over his toes one time, and you'll find out he learned how to swear from Beelzebub himself. That cat knows curses I aint never heard from three generations of sailors."

"So you're from Colorado?" Max asks, flustered.

"Sam is." And he smiles like that's the best thing he's said all day, and that's the most flustering thing of all. His smile isn't like Alec's: there's no joke behind it. It's just something that makes him happy, no attitude or defensive screen needed.

"But you're not? From Colorado?"

"I get around. So Alec does what, he's got the bike job." 

In horror, Max contemplates what Normal would think of an older, tougher version of Alec striding into Normal's office at Jam Pony. It might be instant orgasm. Alec would probably sell tickets. 

Winchester goes on: "He got any old friends in town? Anybody he talks to?"

"I'm the oldest friend he's got," she snaps. And then realizes that's a stupid thing to say. She should have made up a best friend who happens to be out of town this week. Damn Alec anyway, damn him for roping her into this stupid scam.

"Well, shit. He ever tell you anything about his mom?"

Max pauses. She has to think it through. If Alec had grown up with a mom, with a family, what would be different? What unconscious behaviors are giving him the lie every day? She and Cindy glance at each other, uneasy. It is impossible to embroider on a story they don't know.

Winchester notices that glance. "Look," he says, low, "if there's something you know about her that I don't, spit it out. It sounds like he's had it rough, and if she's the reason, I wish you'd tell me so I don't go saying something and make him mad at me." He is drawing circles on the table with his finger, chin tucked down: shy, or awkward, or guilty. 

Max doesn't know what to make of that. She denies, "I don't know anything about his mother."

"But I'm not wrong, am I?" Winchester's keen gaze, like Alec on the prowl. It is bothersome to admit that this man might not be stupid. "He had it pretty rough."

Her shoulders tense, Cindy shifts a little in her seat. Maybe just to remind them she's still here; maybe she's uncomfortable with the lying. Of course, she would know better than Max or Alec what lie would be believed, but Max would never ask that of her. Winchester has not shifted his attention and is drinking in Max's every hesitation. She says the first thing that comes into her head: "Don't ask him about the piano. He can play, but he doesn't usually admit it."

The tenderness that dawns across Winchester's face is awful, frightening. "Okay," he says slowly. "No piano."

"I think he spent some time in a foster home," Cindy adds in. Which is much more the kind of thing Winchester is expecting anyway. "Don't know how long. His charm don't fool nobody."

Winchester shakes his head. "It never does."

Inspiration seizes Max, and she struggles to keep it out of her body language. She puts on her serious face to tell him: "He's been arrested a couple of times. Breaking and entering, grand larceny." She expects him to be shocked, dismayed, and he's not. Attentive, Winchester betrays no sign that it bothers him. She adds, "And there was that thing with the solicitation charge."

A stillness in his features signals she's hit a weak point. He doesn't say anything, doesn't even take a breath to object or investigate, just keeps his face still and waits. Cindy chimes in: "Oh yeah, couple months back? I told him he needed to stay away from that corner. Round 'em up twice a night, seems like."

Max takes punitive pleasure in extending the lie: "It was just that one time, though. After that he figured out the fine art of bribery and he's been scot-free ever since."

That stillness dissolves suddenly, falls open into a dull guffaw, and Winchester laughs in their faces. "Man, I though _Alec_ was a bad liar. How do you get by, with a face like that?"

"There's nothing wrong with my face," Max retorts.

"You're a little bit better at it, " and Winchester gestures at Cindy, "like you at least got some practice blaming your kid brother for the lamp you broke. You, though." He gazes at Max, those weird pale eyes the grayish yellowish color that happens when your boiled eggs spent too much time in the hot water. She steels herself and stares back, chin high, daring him to find anything. He asks Cindy, "You known her long?"

Before Max can bristle, Cindy does it for her. "Old man, Original Cindy knows everything and everybody. And she don't tell nobody nothing. You want the deets on Max, you can go on and ask her yourself. She right around here somewhere."

It is about as angry as Max has ever seen her. Her little sequinned top might as well be battle armor. But all Winchester does is crack up again. Under the table Cindy puts her hand on Max's knee and squeezes it. Max realizes she is being admonished not to beat the crap out of the guy -- maybe because Cindy wants first swing.

Winchester gets his chuckles out. "All right, all right. You got the sisterhood thing, I get it." Really, it keeps seeming like he can't dig any deeper a hole, and then he does it. "I'm just trying to help the kid out. You want to mess around, make this harder on him, that's on you." And then he's serious again, that clear open expression like he's so sure he's right he doesn't care what you think. It's unsettling. It reminds Max that he's the one being scammed here.

Awkward, afraid, Max remonstrates, "He has a right to not have me blabbing his life all over the place."

"He had a right to somebody who could keep him out of foster care. He had a right to be safe from the things that go bump in the night." Winchester's face becomes sharper the more indignant he becomes, his nose like a hawk's beak and his teeth bared. "He had a right to a lot of things he didn't get."

"He survived it, all right?" The urge to defend Alec against this intruder is overwhelming, unlikely, wrong-headed. Max can hear the mistake in her words even as she's saying them. "Whatever they did to him, he turned out okay."

That stillness again. Winchester isn't at the table any more, isn't in the room, though he hasn't moved. His heart rate skyrockets. His lips twitch and Max reads off them one word, _they_ , while Winchester sits there unseeing. The red in his neck seems like a blush, but his ears and fingertips have gone pale. It only takes a moment for her to smell the adrenaline billowing off him like smoke.

She glances at Cindy, and even Cindy with her ordinary senses has noticed. They clasp hands under the table, Max doesn't know why, except that they have to.

Like a volcano subsiding, Winchester controls himself. He blinks and blinks and he's here again, eyes wide but not with surprise. His pulse slows and he breathes more deeply and he flexes his fingers on the table and then folds them together, knuckles tight. The shakes hit while Max watches, the tension in his shoulders and back finally hitting peak. He manages it pretty well, and pretends not to notice that he doesn't have complete control over his own body. His voice is so low in his throat that it almost shades down into a whisper when he asks, "What did they do?"

Max wants to rebuke him again, and can't. She grips Cindy's hand tighter, feels the dig as Cindy squeezes too.

It is Cindy who saves the day, in the end. "I guess you better ask Alec about that, and be happy with the answers you get." She can't quite get the 'tude right, too much straight talk and not enough flippant, but Max is proud of her all the same. 

The frown on Winchester's face is exactly like Alec's frown when one of his little schemes has fallen apart and he doesn't know why. She hates how unsettlingly familiar he is, familiar and strange at the same time.

"Bump in the night?" Max mumbles to herself, wondering. She doesn't expect him to hear or respond to it, but she watches his face shut down and become guarded. It is something she's not meant to know. "What does that mean?"

"Nothing," Winchester tells her, and she's obviously not the only bad liar at this table. "Nothing," he says again, and waves his hand in dismissal.

*

After an evening spent fruitlessly observing parents and their children in noodle houses -- nothing useful for mimicry, unless he wants to be annoying _on purpose_ \-- Alec is in need of a drink. Really, what he needs is to get completely, ridiculously intoxicated, but that's difficult to do when you're a bioengineered human hybrid. He tested it once, right after he got to Seattle: a man, a plan, a half-liter of whisky. It was neat, to feel that warm buzz, to discover himself dizzy and clumsy and the tip of his nose numb. The effect had worn off in an hour, leaving him battle-ready. X-5 livers are fearless.

So really it's just the taste of alcohol he's after, the social ritual of drowning your sorrows, even if their heads won't stay under. He likes the glasses and wood surfaces to lean up against and the unhappy people beside him, but what he likes best is telling the bartender what he wants, and getting it. Being free to destroy yourself however you like is still novelty enough.

Maybe it's dumb, to go back to the bar the Winchesters frequent. But Crash won't do, not unless he wants Max to chase him down and _talk_ or something. And anyway, Alec needs to practice at pool if he's ever going to beat Dean at the game.

Dean is there, of course. Alec trips down the stairs in time to watch him throw a haymaker at a total stranger.

Alec recognizes him immediately, no matter that he's got his back to the door. He's got that beat-up leather jacket on and is sticking a finger into the chest of someone forty pounds heavier than he is, stab stab stab while he makes a point. Alec is thinking to himself how that's the perfect way to pick a fight when the guy he's poking comes to the same conclusion, and shoves Dean backwards. From the top step, the barest corner of Dean's grin is visible as he cocks his head and flexes his knuckles. Alec knows his own temper just well enough to realize that this fight is probably a very bad idea. He darts down the stairs to intervene.

Dean throws his first punch: smooth, furious, full of power. He obviously knows what he's doing (Alec knew that already) and obviously has no intention of playing fair. He connects with a crunch and spins around at once with that strange agility of dance or extreme drunkenness, hands high and ready for another opponent. From where Alec is standing, most of the way across the room still and plenty of people in his way, it looks like there aren't any opponents, so Dean chooses one at random and knocks him down. He takes a clip on the side of the head from a big guy in a cowboy shirt, staggers two or three steps, and comes back at him with a left cross worthy of the fighting ring. As the room goes into pandemonium, Alec is kind of impressed.

Cowboy Shirt is luckily not very stable on his feet. He doesn't recover the way Dean does, can't shake it off and come back harder. Everybody else can, though. It's obvious who started the fight and obvious who's keeping it alive, and Alec struggles past the throng of outstretched fists. They want a beating, and maybe Dean wants one too.

"Wait, wait!" calls Alec. Shoulder-checks and shoves work better in a crowd; they seem like ordinary jostling and not a campaign of forward movement by a determined agent. He wades through the fray to the center knot, where there's nothing for it but to bang on heads and tear at the backs of shoulders. Alec taps a broadshouldered woman on the neck and she goes down on top of the guy next to her. Into the space she's vacated, and now Alec can see that Dean is fighting his way out of a choke hold, two sets of hands on each of his arms. His lip curls back in a snarl, teeth already stained red. For the first time he makes a noise audible above the crowd: a bellow, just a wordless call of anger or desperation or glee, and launches himself backwards at the man who's trying to hold him down.

There's a heavy thump, skull-to-skull, and Alec takes that moment of mutual stun to pull hands away. "I got this, whoa, I got this," he repeats, and puts a worried expression on his face. He pushes away the angry onlookers, palms up and open, and slowly people start to clue in. The shouting abates and the crowd stands at loose ends and all the noise in the room is Dean's rough panting. His fingertips dig into the arm around his neck and he's not far from losing consciousness. Alec shakes himself and steps forward.

"I'm sorry, he gets like that," says Alec, directly to Choke Hold Guy, a bald white guy in red flannel. He's bleeding from the bridge of his nose. "He's drunk. I'll take him home. Are you gonna let me take you home?"

Dean's face is red. He doesn't let go of Choke Hold Guy's arm till Alec pulls his fingers off one by one. Dean doesn't say a word, maybe can't.

"Come on, Dad," says Alec (and he only strangles a little bit on saying it in front of people). "Let him go, I'll take him home."

Choke Hold Guy waits an extra minute or two before he does as he's told. Alec gives him all the innocent concern he can work up, blinks a little extra moisture into his eyes. The arm drops, and Dean stumbles forward into Alec's grip. True to his word, he turns them both toward the door. People back out of the way and Dean slings an arm over Alec's shoulders and they navigate the crowded floor toward the stairs.

"Don't come back here," warns the bartender, loud.

Alec doesn't look back. "He won't."

They climb the stairs slowly. Dean really is a little unsteady on his feet. His breath is whiskyish, sharp. A tiny cut on his forehead bleeds down lazily into his eye.

"What the hell," Alec mutters at him.

Dean doesn't say anything back.

The sleet comes down like an icy blanket, just thick enough to leave a sludge on the streets but still translucent. Snow at least covers stuff up, makes it pretty. Alec likes snow. He has no idea why he's living in a city that doesn't get any. They trudge through the weather, Alec with his hood up but Dean doesn't have anything to keep it off him and doesn't seem to notice, either. The blood washes off his face. Alec has to pull up the collar of his jacket for him. To walk him all the way back to Jo Harvelle's place would take all night, and bicycling while intoxicated has a bad habit of being either hilarious or fatal. So Alec's place it is.

They make it there just as it's warming to rain, heavy and steady and somehow even more bone-chilling than the icy stuff. Dean doesn't ask where they're headed, and seems to recognize the building as they approach it. Of course: he's followed Alec home. Alec did the same to him. No big. Dean shakes off Alec's support and starts up the front steps. Probably that means he hasn't been inside. Alec stops him: "I don't have a front door key."

He makes a face. "Well hell, I'll jigger it for you."

"No," Alec asserts, and decides not to bother picking the lock himself. It's important to him, to show that he knows what he's doing. He wants Dean to know he's not helpless. "I go in the back."

So yeah, there's a certain theatrical tendency in the way he leads this man (this stranger, this "dad") over to the side of the building, shows him the hinged fire-escape that rests about twelve feet off the ground. Alec doesn't even make a running start, just a leap from standing. It's something any ordinary who plays basketball can do. He catches the last rung of the ladder and does a chin-up one-handed while his weight levers the whole contraption down towards ground level. He slithers between the rungs and is astride the ladder by the time it is vertical.

"Going up?" he asks. But Dean's chuckle and raised eyebrows are a little too ironic and not enough impressed. He follows Alec up the ladder and on up the steps to his floor. He's clumsier than Alec is expecting, now there's no danger involved. He trips on the ladder once, bangs his shoulder and curses under his breath. Alec waits for him at the top and says nothing, offers no hand to help.They come out of the rain into the living room, and Alec shuts out the weather.

Maybe it's a mistake to allow him in. Maybe Alec should play the dead-mother card, and keep Dean at arm's length. But he's not really sure how to do that, and the dry towels are in here, not out on the street. He tries not to guess what Dean is thinking as he surveys the apartment. It's warm (guess who doesn't pay for his own heat) and spacious (ditto), and it hasn't been painted in about a century. The furniture's kind of old and kind of worn out and there are a couple of cobwebs on the ceiling that Alec hasn't got around to cleaning up. But what the hell, he's got his own bed, wide enough to bring somebody home to it, and it doesn't squeak. He's got a hot shower as long as he wants, and his own fridge, and he can just buy new dishes and throw the old ones away, whenever he decides he doesn't want to wash them. He owns five toothbrushes, one for every work day, just because he can. It's a good place.

The expression on Dean's face is gloomy.

"What," asks Alec, a little miffed, "You don't like it?"

And Dean does that thing, where he shakes his head and turns away with a chuckle, that could mean anything. He paces toward the kitchenette and suddenly with two people in it the space is small. Without asking for permission, Dean parks himself on the couch and puts his feet up. His boots clunk on the unsteady table and his balance isn't up to it; one foot falls off. 

"So how much did you have?"

Dean squints and puts his forefinger and his thumb close together. Just a little bit. "Can't do it in front of Sam." 

"He doesn't like you drinking?"

Again, that same gesture: forefinger and thumb half an inch apart. "He keeps count," he says. "He's a worrier." He waves his hand with that distinctive combination of affection and annoyance. Alec doesn't know what Sam would think if he could see this scene, doesn't have a good feel for how they are with each other. The closest he can guess is what Max would do, and what she would do is smack him upside the head and call him a fool.

Nervy, Alec paces a little and then remembers they're both soaked and goes to fetch towels. There's space on the couch for two (if they like each other) and Dean clearly wants him to sit. He settles on the arm out of Dean's reach, though, and tosses the towel to him rather than get close. Something funny passes behind the man's eyes, something Alec can't quite place.

"Hey kid," he says, while Alec pulls off his wet hoodie. The sweater and t-shirt are wet too, so Alec just strips down and heads into the bedroom for something else to wear. He grabs something out of the clean-clothes pile and pulls it on, and then has to take it off and turn it right-side out. He comes back into the living room and Dean is just waiting for him, hasn't even toweled off his head, and his ears are still red and dripping. Dean waits for him to sit again before he goes on. "Hey kid, I uh, I been walking around all night trying to get this clear in my head, and I know I told you I wouldn't ask," -- You did? wonders Alec. He doesn't remember being told that -- "but I gotta know. And I'm sorry to put you through it, but I can't not know."

"Okay," Alec prompts. Maybe they'll tell each other drunken stories now. Maybe Alec will be able to insert the right plausible details and have him wake up in the morning convinced they'd told each other all. A little weird, but a good opportunity. There are a couple of bottles in the cabinet, just the cheap stuff, the kind of thing Alec greases palms with. It's a question whether to offer that to Dean, or to break out the pre-Pulse bottle he keeps in the bedroom. Alec is still considering it when a flask comes out from under Dean's jacket. Just a little one, silvery, with a screw-top. The silver ring on his finger clanks off the flask as he offers it to Alec.

"So when you were a kid, eight, nine, not too long before the Pulse, you didn't -- did anybody mess with you?" The question comes just as Alec raises the flask to his lips. Clearly, he's meant to react, and doesn't know how. He ignores the question and Dean goes on: "I mean teachers, social services, people in authority. Like they said they had your best interests at heart but you looked at them and got froze up inside?"

It sounds like a trick question, or like a question from somebody who knows all about his track record with Psy-Ops. Alec is not sure what else authority figures are supposed to do besides freeze you up inside, whether it's age nine or nineteen. Dean is expecting him to say something.

"I got smacked around in school," he offers. "Bigger kids, picking on me." It's a good lie, a lie he's recycled from one of Dean's own stories. The burn of alcohol down his throat: it's not the cheap stuff. 

Dean watches him swallow, hawk-eyed, and then lets out a long breath. He raises his face to the ceiling and his eyes are shiny. "If they'd got to you, you'd know." Alec observes in silence as he pulls himself together, clears his throat. He doesn't linger on it, just takes the flask back from Alec and re-settles himself on the couch. "There were some... guys that didn't like me and Sam, when you were a kid. If they'd known you existed, they would have gone after you to get at me."

"What? Why?" 

His face is granite. "There's a lot of shit they coulda pulled, a lot of twisted shit, and most of it would still have left you alive. You can really fuck yourself up, working out what they coulda done. Hence --" and he gestures with the silver flask, sardonic, before taking another drink. His knuckles on the flask whiten. Alec can't even describe the expression on Dean's face, just that it's intense and terrifying and difficult to look at. So they're both staring at the wall when Dean says, "As bad as you had it, and you're not fooling anybody on that one, as bad as you had it, it's a fucking _miracle_ they didn't get their hands on you. A _fucking_ miracle." 

Alec schools his features away from irony. It's kind of flattering, to pretend that the whole Manticore program was built and founded on the core idea of Messing With 494, but even he doesn't have that kind of ego. The trouble is how well Dean has guessed already. Not that you would ever make the leap from bad childhood to _I was a brainwashed child-assassin for the military-industrial complex_ , but he's made some pretty surprising leaps already.

"I'm all right," Alec mumbles. He snatches at the unused towel on the couch, shoves it toward Dean. You're supposed to dry yourself off when you come in from the rain. It's what normal people do. Dean's left hand comes up and Alec just has time to register that the last two fingers are crooked, bent sideways from the second knuckle, when that hand closes on his own wrist. Instead of the towel, Dean tugs on Alec, not hard enough for violence. He thinks he should keep his distance but that grip is too strong, Dean's voice too raw. Alec gives in and lets himself slither onto the couch. That hand comes up around his shoulder, a hard squeeze. It cups the back of his neck, moves up into his scalp, pulls him in. The skin of Dean's cheek is clammy against Alec's forehead, sweat or the remainder of rain. He's hot, a tremble in his ribs that he's keeping under control. He makes some kind of choking noise in his throat and Alec is exalted and ashamed at the same time.

They sit that way, maybe a long time. There's a hand smoothing down Alec's hair again and again, though it wasn't messy the last time he checked. His nice, dry shirt is getting wet again from Dean's clothing. He doesn't know what to do with his hands, so he plays with the steel zipper on Dean's jacket while he breathes and listens to a body breathe against him. It is dazzling and terrifying. His heart pounds like a firefighter breaking down doors and the backs of his eyes hurt. It's like -- he doesn't know what it's like.

"Nobody got to me," says Alec. Now his throat is tight too, and he doesn't know why. "Nobody got to me. I'm all right."

"I used to know a guy who did miracles," Dean tells the walls, hoarse. "Guess I owe him." And that's the signal that he's over it, or something. He loosens his grip and Alec straightens up and it's not even weird to be crammed together side by side on the narrow couch. Dean already has a hand on his face, covering his eyes, and he wipes downward like he's cleaning the mess off a table to get ready for something else. Alec still has no idea what he's been talking about but it's clear he doesn't want to talk about it any more. His eyelashes are wet, stuck together.

"So you like this city?" asks Dean, and stretches out his face into an ugly kind of smile. "You want to stay here, or could I interest you in someplace else?"

"It's okay," Alec allows, and accepts the flask as it's offered again. It is less frightening, to turn back to ordinary things, but it's a little disappointing too. "Be nicer with less police presence."

"Martial law's a bitch." Dean chuckles. "Hey, could be worse: you could live in a state where drinking's illegal."

Alec scoffs a little, hands back the flask.

"No kidding. All of Utah. Probably 80% of my business is smuggling rotgut across the state border. Water it down when we get there, it's practically soda pop by the time it's sold. I mean, what the hell, right? Less of a hassle than hustling pool." Dean is smiling with his head back, his white throat bared in the mobile, grayish light from the window. "If gas didn't cost so much it'd be just like Smoky and the Bandit.... which..." Obviously Alec's face gives him away. "Which is a movie you've never seen, with car chases and evading the law and like that. It's a lot more boring on trains, but it's a living. They don't plow the roads in winter any more, so it's that or you haul barrels on your back."

Alec has not spent much time around trains. There's a depot in Seattle, of course, and you can make a buck now and then playing middleman on a shipment, but trains carry bulk, and that's a lot more than Alec can move by himself. Probably the smuggler Jo spends a lot of time on trains. That's probably how she and Dean met.

Trains are for people to flee on, is what Alec thinks. Trains are for getting transgenics out of the country safely, away from scrutiny.

"Dude," says Dean suddenly, and that's such a strange word: a noun, a name, a piece of punctuation. Alec doesn't know anybody else who says _dude_ , unless Sam counts. "Dude, I haven't even told you about the car. Sixty-seven Impala, perfect machine. My dad taught me every inch of that car, and I can teach you too." Without waiting for any sign of interest, he launches into an explanation of antique engines.

As if he'd split in two, Alec observes himself as he falls under the spell of Dean's enthusiasm. The man takes up space, not in a menacing way but in a way that owns anything he touches. He spreads his arms to express the size of his beloved car, and the liquor in him makes that gesture clumsy, human, all-enveloping. He delves into the arcana of mechanical function and his bumpy knuckles curl into one another, rough biological gears. Alec realizes with a start that Dean has broken more than just the two fingers on his left hand, and they've all healed badly.

It's warm in the room, and Dean peels off his leather jacket without breaking the monologue on combustion. He drops the flannel layer too and he's in just a t-shirt. He's got the ropy muscles of hard work, and a burn scar peeking out his sleeve at the shoulder. Alec doesn't just _like_ him, he kind of wants to _be_ him.

"She's in the barn at Sam's place, and if he's not a dumbass he's keeping the cats out of her back seat this time. I was up there last spring and there were kittens all over the place. Man, it was a mess." The car, right. Alec is listening attentively about the very important car. He laughs when Dean laughs. "I bring up a can of gas every spring and we take her out for a spin. Ten gallons is just enough to get to Grand Junction and back, nice long ride on the old interstate."

"Cars are cool," says Alec, as if he's ever driven one without the privilege of stealing it first.

"Now see," says Dean, and he's relaxed now, his arm along the back of the couch, encompassing Alec without touching him, "that's proof you're a Winchester right there. I got it from my dad, you get it from me. Sam is some kind of weird throwback, like webbed feet or a tail."

They laugh together. It's easy, comfortable. It's like they've known each other for years, for all their lives. Alec likes the person Dean thinks he is.

Dean's eyes flick up and down: he doesn't like to be caught staring. Alec has no such aversion, and enjoys the mirror-effect of emotion coming and going on a face so like his own. He kind of wants to reach out and poke Dean in the nose, and find out whether he goes numb when he's drunk too, but that's too intimate so he doesn't. Alec realizes after a little while that they've been observing each other in silence for too long. Dean clears his throat.

"I look at you, and I don't see her. That's asshole, I know." Dean turns his face away, fidgets with the flask's screw-cap. "But looking at you, it's like looking in the mirror. I can't see anybody else in that face of yours."

The adrenaline surges in Alec's veins. He's forgotten his cover story entirely. "I --" he starts shakily, and Dean puts a hand on his knee to stop him.

"You don't have to tell me who she was." Dean's voice is firm, and Alec is ridiculously grateful.

*

So it turns out that sewers stink. It's kind of a surprise, that blast of sour shit and sweet vegetable rot as they open the grate. Her tidy yellow braid over her shoulder, Jo sets the heavy square cover down on the road with a clank and shines her flashlight down into the hole. Her nostrils don't even flare at the smell. Dean has not been in a sewer in a long time.

He follows her lead, down the steel ladder and into the dim, concrete tunnel. It's cold, but not as cold as aboveground. Jo shines the light one way, and then the other way, to get her bearings. She's armed, just a handgun and her dad's old knife. There isn't the elbow room for shotguns, and anyway, this is just recon. For all she says she hasn't hunted since the Pulse, she falls back into the routine pretty quick.

"Smugglers gave this up without a fight?" he asks, as they walk into a chamber. It's got a reservoir of dank water a couple inches deep, though Dean can't tell which of the feeder tunnels has been active most recently. The drainage tunnel is opposite where he's standing, and slopes downward into the gloom. Above his head, the dull glow of the outside through a heavy steel grate.

"Some people can't take it," answers Jo, oblique. She pokes at a corner of the room, turns up some candles stored on a ledge. They've got black wicks, still oily: recent use. "They hear the echo and they feel the land above their heads and they bug out. Sometimes they last a good long while before the switch flips and then they can't go under any more."

Dean snoops the edges of the tunnels, peers at the greasy handprints at shoulder height. There's probably years of them, going back to when actual sewer workers used to work here.

"First few times," Jo goes on, "everybody said it was just a couple of late switches. Bridger'd been on my crew three years, but it's been known to happen that late. But then we got word of shapes, weird noises. Somebody said it was haunted. People believe in that kind of thing, now."

A grunt is all Dean's answer. Now that the world's moved on, of course they believe it. He follows her down one of the side tunnels, past some old anarchist graffiti and a defunct phone jack. Jo shines her flashlight on the old circuit box, shows how the wire's been torn out for scrap. She also turns up an empty carton of milk, and its cap on top of the box, neat. The expiration date on the milk is less than a month ago.

"I only saw something once, myself, but I don't think it was a haunting." They move on down the cold corridor. Tiny drips up ahead indicate they're headed into a more active part of the waterways. Jo doesn't stop walking as she says, "Looked like a mutant to me. Pale, bald. Pointy ears. Wore sweats, nothing exotic. I turned a corner and crashed into it and it gave a shout and ran away. That was all."

"And your people wouldn't come down here on account of one mutant?"

Jo's flashlight bares all. On a pipe above their heads, claw marks make bright steel lines amid the rust. "Other people said it was seven feet tall, or like a black shadow. Long hair, harelip, barked and howled, moved too fast for human sight. I don't know," she concluded, her irritation obvious. "The thing that clinched it was when a couple of cops turned up dead. Slashed, was the word, by some kind of hairy monster out of the sewers. Everybody just said no after that."

They come to an intersection. The drips from a crack in the concrete build slow brown stalactites in the ceiling. Dean pauses and gestures for some light at his feet. In the mud below: footprints. Bare feet, toes all the same size. The little divots of toenails in front of each pool of a toe. "Jackpot," Dean mutters to himself. Whatever it is, its stride is as wide as a man's.

"Ghosts don't leave footprints," Jo says, and shrugs. She skirts the evidence and leads him onward.

Now that there's a real monster to hunt, Dean can feel himself relaxing into the routine of it. Even just having a partner breathing the same air as him is a comfort, and a rehearsal: "Alec is gonna love this."

"You're gonna tell him first, right? Not just shock him with the visual?" Her voice is loud, the angled runoff channels above their heads making a multiple echo.

"Course I'm gonna tell him," says Dean, although he hasn't really thought it out. He just knows this is going to happen, and that's enough for now.

They walk Jo's old routes, one after another. Dean assembles the map of it in his head, the landmarks. Jo doesn't talk unless she needs to, and the quiet is nice. She uses the flashlight like a pointer: a pile of animal bones, a trash pile of rotting apple cores and takeout boxes, a spot that smells like a recent latrine. They don't find the place where it sleeps, but not for lack of trying. It's a good two hours, and Jo just comfortable by his side, like a partner. She doesn't seem bored, but she doesn't thrill to it the way Dean does. She's got a line between her brows like she's been chewing on a problem all day long. So it's not a complete surprise that, as they're rounding back towards where they started from, she starts asking questions.

That way that's too casual, she says, "So Sam was telling me about Colorado."

"Yeah," Dean mutters. He's not all that interested in a big serious Talk so he plays dumb. "I don't think you ever met Daniel Elkins. Well, we didn't either, we looked through his house after he got killed. Sam and me rebuilt the roof in the living room, but otherwise it was in pretty good shape."

Another way Jo is like her mother: that _look_ , that way that makes it hard to lie to her.

"Sam'll deny it, but they're poor as churchmice," he says, and then realizes that it sounds like a sympathy ploy. But, you know, it's true, and there's not a lot of people he can tell who would know that saying it isn't disloyalty. "They pretend like railroad work and a couple of construction jobs every summer have them rolling in the dough. I slip Rose some cash when he's not looking, else I don't know how they'd get by."

"Yeah, that's not the way he characterized it." Her voice is breathy, low, like stealth or like the early stages of crying.

Not to hard to guess what she and Mister Emo would have wanted to talk about. "He say anything about Bobby?"

"No." Jo doesn't do that pushy, needy thing she used to do. Tramping along in the concrete echoes, she doesn't say another word. So they're going to do the whole rest of the trip with hand-gestures, or he's gonna have to say it.

"Okay, if you want to blame somebody, you can blame me," he tells her. It's not so hard to say in the dark, with the flashlight pointed off into the murky distance. "I'm the one decided not to push on through the mountains before the snows came. I'm the one that remembered Elkins's cabin and I'm the one that drove us there."

He's fumbling a little here, unsure what to say. Jo walks faster, out in front with her back to him, so he can't figure out her mood. As long as he can get out of the conversation without her laying anything more at Sam's feet, it'll count as a win.

"Mom and I didn't hear about it immediately," she says. Her voice is a little unsteady, and the echoes ripple it back to her, magnfied. "They killed him in December and we got word after the new year. But we managed to salvage a lot of his books. It stayed cold enough the wet ones froze."

Dean clears his throat. "You took care of the body." It's not a question.

"There wasn't much body to take care of," Jo snaps. Dean guesses in the second before she says it: "They roasted him alive in that iron kettle he called a panic room."

The long shudder goes through him and over him and then he lets it pass. He's set the match to enough corpses that it's not hard to visualize. If he was smart, and Bobby was always smart, he saved the last bullet and didn't suffer much. Jo is standing at an intersection, dank passages on all sides of her, with her hand on her hip. Dean gawks at her a minute before he realizes she's waiting for him. He catches up and he can see her face, the lines on it, the anger that's as fresh as if no time had passed.

"The official story was he set the fire himself. They brought in hoses and put it out after it had gone through half the house, and he was already dead so they didn't feel too bad about looting his pantry and the gasoline drums he had out in the garage. I talked to ten or fifteen people about it. Only a couple of them would meet my eyes while they told me that."

Of course they came in and put out the fire. The gasoline would have exploded otherwise, and killed the crowd in addition to wasting a precious resource. Dean has heard about the rioting of course, in Sioux City as in Seattle, starvation and armed robbery and the National Guard shooting into crowds as often as not. He's taken care of a couple of those ghosts in his day, just small-time cleanup. It's different when it's somebody you know. 

They trudge down another passageway and don't say anything. It stews between them, like the petty arguments he used to have with Sam when they were on the road and sick of each other. He never gets sick of Sam any more.

"They turned on him because he was different." Jo says it to the passageway in front of them, and doesn't wait for Dean to catch up. There are tears in her voice as she goes on, "Because he was private and grumpy and alone. Most of the people I talked to didn't even know about the supernatural stuff. They just wanted his stockpiles."

Dean lets out a breath. He hasn't been back to Sioux Falls. He doesn't know whether they've got martial law and sector checkpoints like Seattle does, or if the one sacrificial victim let them all go back to good old midwestern neighborliness. And he is definitely not going to be telling Sam about all this.

"I don't blame you," Jo concludes, and as she turns the flashlight is blinding in his eyes. She points it away, down his body, and his white shirt bounces the light all over and makes her face glow. Those dark eyes of hers eat him up. "And I don't blame Sam either."

Tense, Dean gathers himself to walk on. But Jo's not done: she presses in close, fighting-close, earnest and shy at the same time.

"If you'd made it back to his place you'd just have died next to him." There's the hook of an accusation in her voice.

He takes it like the big dumb fish he is. "If we hadn't fought the demons and triggered the Pulse, somebody else would have."

Jo fades back, out of the light. Her voice is ghostly: "I wish you'd asked for help." 

"No point putting anybody else in danger."

"It could have been different," she insists.

"Yeah," says Dean, and steps around her. "But it wasn't."

They make it back to the ladder they started from without any more talk, and they climb back out into fresh air and the fading daylight. The alley is deserted. Dean takes a crisp lungful, sniffs at his clothes. He's going to need a shower. Jo is diligent, and drags the sewer grate back to where it belongs. It's a whole different world down there: shouldn't be a surprise that the weird of this earth have moved in underground.

"Anyway," says Jo. She's got a finality to her, that way of somebody who knows how to make do. "Doesn't take a killer angel to destroy a man. We do that to each other just fine."

Dean has nothing to say to that. He follows her out of the alleyway and back into the clatter of everyday traffic.

*

Max slaps down a grotty envelope instead of saying Hello. It marks the table as it lands, grease or dirt or something, one ugly mark on the clean wide surfaces of Logan's eyrie apartment. Alec has been here a good twenty minutes already, early enough for gossip, but Logan has been in some kind of pissy, incommunicative mood, and it looks like Max is the reason, as usual.

"What'd I do now?" Alec asks her, smirking. It falls off his face as she stands there with her accusatory little frown. Logan's frowning too, that Deep Thoughts kind of frown that is really a lot more annoying than it is deep. They obviously both know something he doesn't, and it's obviously bad enough for Max to zoom right past irritated to shoot-lasers-out-her-eyes _angry_. He hasn't seen her like this much, and it's unsettling. Alec asks again: "Oh, man, what did I do?"

"Exactly what I told you not to do?" she snaps. Her nose pinches up as she says it and she turns away, mournful. "Please just tell me you didn't tell them anything."

"What, the Winchesters? Of course not." He shrugs his genuine bafflement. "I'm not dumb enough to mix up the details like that."

"You didn't show off for them? No boasting?"

He opens his mouth to make a joke, and stops. "Max, what is it." 

She doesn't answer, just looks to Logan. Without a word Logan starts tapping at his keyboard, and then leans back in his wheelchair. Alec crowds in to see over Logan's shoulder as a video file opens up wide. The film resolves: it is Alec's own face, paused mid-blink. No, it's Alec's face a little older, a little more freckled, above a vintage leather jacket. Of course: it's Dean.

"This is your guy," Logan explains unnecessarily. "It's from Baltimore, so it survived the Pulse. I found it in a dormant file, a murder thirteen years old. Never officially solved, by the way." He hits a key and the video lurches to life.

There are shadows under Dean's eyes from the angle of the light. When he moves, even just his head and shoulders, Alec can recognize him at once. It's only in still image that they could be confused for each other; Dean's body language is unique. He leans forward toward the camera. He is very serious. "My name is Dean Winchester, I'm an Aquarius, and I enjoy sunsets, long walks on the beach, and frisky women."

His eyes are alight. It's a joke after all, and Alec's mouth turns up the way the mouth on the screen does. He can feel Max's anger like radiant heat. Dean goes on:

"And I did not kill anyone. But I know who did, or rather _what_ did." He turns to his left, speaking to someone offscreen. His eyes crinkle in that way that Alec is coming to recognize as annoyed disdain. "Course it can't be for sure, cause our investigation was interrupted. But our working theory is that we're looking for some kind of vengeful spirit."

A female voice interrupts: "Scuse me?" just as Logan hits the pause button.

"Scuse me?" Alec repeats, blank.

"Yeah, I thought it was metaphorical." Logan gives a shrug. "But --" He unpauses the video.

Dean continues. "Y'know, Casper the bloodthirsty ghost? Tony Giles saw it. I'll bet you cash money Karen did too. But see, the interesting thing is..." Alec stops listening. All he can do is stare at his own face, his own face in five years instead of twenty, watch the brows come together and then apart, and the way those eyes flick from the camera to the offscreen interrogators and back again. His expression is serious, but not in an angry way. It's something more like pity, with no doubt in him and no interest in hysteria. Alec could not pull off that performance himself. The soft sprawl of Texan vowels smoothes out the insane words into something confident, comforting, believeable. The performance ends with a grin and a ta-dah hand-gesture, and that's the first time it's clear that Dean's wrists are marked with handcuff bruises.

"Okay, so he's a little crazy," Alec concedes.

Max pokes him. "Shut up and watch."

"You murdered them in cold blood," a male voice says offscreen. His voice is closer to the mike now; Dean has to turn his head further to the left to maintain eye-contact. "Just like that girl in St. Louis."

"Oh yeah," says Dean, and settles in his chair. "That wasn't me either. That was a shape-shifter creature that only looked like me."

Alec is remembering that first night they met, how _You some kind of shapeshifter?_ sounded like a sarcastic remark. On the screen, shouts, a grunt, a blur of angry motion and the camera pixelates for several moments. When it regains its focus Dean's face isn't there any longer; just the wall and the tension of bodies at the edge of the camera's field.

The female voice intervenes. "Pete, that is _enough_."

The man lets Dean go and steps away. Dean puts one hand down into the camera's field, casual. That silver ring on his right hand, as if in twenty years he's never taken it off. "You asked for the truth."

Logan doesn't need to pause it this time. The footage ends and Alec can't guess what happened next. "That's all," says Logan.

"That's all that's on camera," Max corrects. She picks up the envelope from before and smacks it against Alec's chest.

He stares from one to the other, reluctant. Logan is playing invisible, and will be no help. Alec suddenly doesn't want to know. He has guessed a little bit, or anyway his hands have moved on ahead of his ability to articulate the dark ideas blooming in his brain.

It's an envelope full of paper, official stuff. The forms are soothingly bland, one typewritten line after another. They're all in eastern states, all watermarked with seals and crests and official-looking logos. It's not till he has riffled through the first couple of pages that he discovers the picture of Sam Winchester, looking miserable. It looks a lot like the picture he used on all his IDs, except that the little letterboard in the photo doesn't say Guy Smiley, it says Samuel Winchester. It's no mockup. He is under arrest.

The form spells out his crimes: breaking and entering, in some tiny town in a state far away. As arrest records go -- and who doesn't have one of those? -- it's relatively paltry. He didn't even resist arrest; he didn't even touch enough things to be charged with larceny. It's the page after that one that's the real kicker, and it's only the beginning of a whole sheaf that Logan has oh-so-thoughtfully provided.

The next page is a smudged copy of FBI paperwork for an interstate extradition. It lists Samuel Winchester's height and weight, his age (23), his identifying marks (apparently, he's got a circular scar on one forearm). His known associates: Dean Winchester. His potential crimes: armed robbery. Vandalism. Arson. Destruction of property. Illegal trespass in a federal cemetery, theft from same. Accessory to or conspiracy in five murders. (Suspicion of a couple more.) The person suspected of committing said murders: Dean Winchester.

"I guess they won't get on my case about a little bit of theft," says Alec faintly.

Logan won't look up from his keyboard. He says over his shoulder, "Records of their west coast activity were probably destroyed in the Pulse. Everything I've found so far is east, although the armed robbery was in Milwaukee. That's when the feds got involved."

"So they're crooks," says Alec. He doesn't even look for the parallel paperwork on Dean. "I'm a crook. Max, you're a crook too."

Max does not want to hear it. She grabs at the papers in his hands and shuffles them. "Murders in St. Louis," she reminds him as she shoves the pages in his face. The topmost page is a coroner's diagram, pen-slashes to represent the cuts. There are lots and lots of cuts. It can't have been quick. The next page: the same thing, on a different body. Beside him, Max's breathing has gone fast, her eyes wide -- and that little sad frown she saves for things Alec is not allowed to ask about. He wonders if it's true, that rumor that his twin turned up a violent nutcase. Alec has been careful never to find out for sure.

But they must have had a reason. They've been so ridiculously accommodating and gentle and _nice_. There must have been some terrible, desperate reason for them to work over a couple of people in St. Louis. Logan and his stupid grim face can't possibly understand what the circumstances were. "But --"

"I wondered about that word, _shapeshifter_." Logan squints at the screen and talks over his shoulder. "Do you know, are there any transgenics designed for camouflage?"

The look on Max's face brings it together, like when you open a jar of spoiled mayonnaise and the smell hits you all at once. "Oh," Alec says, slow. He pauses until he's sure his voice won't shake. "You think they worked for Manticore. You think they worked in exterminations."

Patches of skin, folded into a little black book. Barcodes to mark a unique target identified and destroyed. Max just stares at him, clear-eyed.

Logan pauses before holding out one last page. "The Baltimore police mention digging up a body. That was left behind, in St. Louis." Alec lets out a breath while Logan works himself up to the finale: "That looked exactly like Dean Winchester. He was the last victim, like all the rest had been tortured to get to that one." Logan nods his head at the papers in Alec's hands, as if he'll find that photo in the pile. Of all the things Alec doesn't want to see --

He drops the whole sheaf onto the table. There's no way. He _likes_ these people. They can't be like that. "...But the guy believes in ghosts." 

"And he destroys anybody that doesn't fit his idea of human," Max retorts, disgusted. "He and his brother would hunt us down as soon as look at us."

"Their father was military, you said?" asks Logan, typing frantically. Alec hasn't said. He has kept that fact to himself, like his memory of the pictures in Sam's leather-bound notebook. It bothers him that somebody else knows about it now.

"But," he insists, "he believes in _ghosts_. He's not a Manticore assassin, he's just crazy."

"I think he was a loose cannon," Logan interjects. He wheels around, his screen showing another still from footage of Dean. This isn't a nice head-shot with the early crinkles around his eyes: his eyes are wide, lit so brightly his eyelashes cast shadows on his skin. He is terrified or angry or both, his mouth forming a swear word. His plaid sleeves are rolled up to show his forearms, an automatic weapon in his hands. That's not the Dean Alec knows, the Dean who sat with him on the couch with both of them damp from rain. Logan goes on: "The way the feds talk about the two of them, it's like they're a cross between Special Forces and an urban legend. Maybe even Manticore couldn't control them; maybe that's why they exist at all in the official record."

"Just what we need," Max sneers. "Freelance vigilantes."

Alec wipes the sweat off his upper lip. "But that was before the Pulse. It's been _years_."

"And you think they just retired?" 

"I --" Alec glances, helpless, at the two closed faces in front of him. Logan's bleak pity is less bothersome than Max's rage, only because Logan doesn't matter as much. "Let me talk to Sam. He said something, about settling down. It's, he kind of, yeah, maybe they did retire. Maybe they're not dangerous any more."

"You've got to get them out of the city," Logan supplies. "Before they notice a transgenic and decide on a reunion tour."

"They wouldn't --"

"Wouldn't they?" Max asks.

Alec's throat is too tight to answer, even if he did know what to say to that.


	4. The Mutant Expression

Of all the things Alec has thought about asking the Winchesters for, a smarmy heart-to-heart was about last on the list. And yet here he is, following his "uncle" into one of the richer sectors of town on a coffee-hunt so they can pour their guts out to each other like family members are apparently supposed to. Alec didn't even have to come up with a reason: Sam asked, and asked in a way that made it clear he didn't want Dean along.

So maybe there's a weakness there to exploit between them. Maybe they'll tell each other's secrets and Alec will be able to make sense out of this thing. He lopes down the street behind Sam, not quite at the double-quick but quick enough to match that long stride. They're clean sidewalks, gray concrete instead of patched tar, and the storefronts don't have any bars on the windows. There's ladies around, dressed up somehow even though they're not wearing dresses, shopping bags on their arms and flashy rings on their fingers. Alec has never tried to de-ring a stranger on a busy street, and Sam probably wouldn't know how to run a diversion anyway, but it's nice to think about while they're walking. Alec even knows a fence who'd take gold, would melt it down and --

And Sam has his hand on the door handle of a shop. He's got some kind of coffee radar, and ushers Alec into the place like he belongs here, not on the other side of town. He doesn't seem to notice the look he gets from a man in a business suit. Sam is definitely not wearing a business suit, and neither is Alec.

"I'm buying," says Sam, and heads straight to the counter. Which is funny, because Alec still has his wallet. Sam fishes a couple of crinkled bills out of his pocket and flashes a smile at the clerk that goes south as he looks at her. She doesn't look weird: pinned hair, uniform all in order, all nice and cheerful and submissive, but Sam carries away the two cups he's ordered with a long face. He turns to Alec and says, a little sheepish, "I used to go to places like this all the time."

"Used to like a hundred years ago, right?" Alec sasses him, not too mean. Sam stirs sugar into his coffee while he assesses the room. He's figured out he doesn't blend in here, at least. Alec can do okay, can straighten up his spine and get a little haughty and nobody'll notice his jacket collar's frayed, but Sam can't do it, or won't. He points them toward the door.

Outside, Sam gives a little unhappy chuckle. "Yeah, coffee shops were a lot different when I was in college." He steers them on down the sidewalk, away, anyplace.

"You went to college?" asks Alec, alarmed. Maybe only Dean was a guard at Manticore. Maybe Sam was a scientist. Maybe that's what made them such an effective pair of killers. But Sam doesn't hear that note in Alec's voice.

"Yeah, it meant something different back then." He waves his hand like it's smoke he can fan away. "Or maybe it didn't. Anyway, I never finished."

They walk. They drink their coffee. Alec doesn't know what to say next. It's not the easiest topic in the world to bring up: Hey how bout those little mutant kids you used to put down? Good times, am I right? Max would find a way.

"So --" he begins, just as Sam is saying,

"You could just give me my wallet back --"

Sam turns away with a little smile on his face. He gestures with the coffee in his hand: they're coming up to another checkpoint soon. He'll need his sector pass again, the one that says his name is Chandler Bing. There isn't too much of a line here -- nobody's itching too hard to leave. Just one sleek black car and in the pedestrian line four or five housemaids, slumped at the end of their day. 

"Beats having to hand me the pass every half-mile," Sam finishes. "Anyway, you can keep the cash. And since the credit cards aren't in my name, it doesn't really matter if you max them out."

Alec has already secreted the credit cards days ago. So the rest of the wallet, yeah, he can return it. All it's worth now is the quality of the forged identities, and it seems likely that the forger is somebody Dean knows down in Utah or someplace far away. He pulls it and hands it over as they get into line.

It's totally obvious he's been through every fold and pocket of the thing, so not worth lying about. Sam slides out the picture of himself and Dean as kids and angles it in the dull afternoon light: covered with fingerprints. But he just sort of smiles to himself and puts that one back in favor of the other photo.

Two dark-haired kids and a cat, Alec remembers. Both girls, so they're obviously not the Winchesters. Sam thumbs it out of its slot and offers it to Alec without a word. So there's a clue in there, some detail in the background, and Alec hunts in silence. The older girl's sweater is probably red, though the colors in the photo have all yellowed enough that it looks orangey-pink. They both have all their baby teeth, tiny chiclets in grinning gums -- they might be five and three years old, not much older or younger. Their skin is yellowish from the fading and their eyes are brown and their hair straight and brown and up in rough pigtails secured with string. The cat they're holding looks indignant, ears back, propped up by the shoulders and its hindquarters long enough its back paws might be on the floor. Its belly is striped. There isn't anything on the walls behind them, just rough wood like a barn or cheap crates in a warehouse. Alec doesn't know what he's supposed to see.

"Cute kids," he says, just to be polite.

Sam's gaze is sharp, greedy. "That's Maggie on the left, and Sarah on the right. They're your cousins."

Cousins. Alec doesn't know what to do with that word. He looks again while the line they're in shuffles forward. The two girls look like each other, but not really like -- well, Maggie has dimples. But mostly, they look like two little kids, baby fat and funny little-kid noses and everything all round and indistinct. They look _familiar_ , but he doesn't recognize them the way he did Dean. They look like any two little kids, and might have barcodes on their necks. The light in Sam's face as he thinks about them -- he can't possibly be a killer.

"It's all the way down to Grand Junction to get pictures developed, so it's lucky I found an old Polaroid in the cabin."

"What's a Polaroid?" 

Sam chuckles. "Self-developing camera film. I think it was already out of business before the Pulse. We'd had digital cameras for a couple of years by then. Man, I haven't seen one of those in forever."

Alec nods absently. They're expensive toys, and power-hogs to boot. Crappy cell-phone cameras are about the limit these days, but if Sam lives someplace remote, then he probably doesn't even get cell service. Sam is still looking at him, gleaning who knows what out of the expression on his face. He switches topics. "So you're from Colorado or someplace?"

"Yeah, up in the mountains. It's pretty far away from anything else. I decided to just stay, you know? Pick a place and just stay, and the cabin was as good a place as any once we'd fixed it up. And then when Rose came to town --" Sam shakes his head. 

"Your wife," says Alec.

They're at the front of the line, and both lapse into silence with the cops right there. They sip their coffee side by side. Alec pockets the picture in order to fish out his sector pass and they're through without any trouble. Sam has the right instincts: head down, long stride but not too hasty as they walk away. He blends in. Alec hasn't decided yet whether that's creepy. He turns the corner into an alley and the instant he's out of the sight of the uniforms his head snaps back up and the pretense is gone.

"So, no other family, right?" Alec asks, "Just you and your brother, right? Till the whole wife-and-kids thing?"

"No, just us," says Sam, slow. "We lost a lot of people in the years before the Pulse. I'm really sorry you never got to meet our dad." And he's _smiling_ , like he can hardly control it. Alec is so drawn to that smile he almost forgets he is supposed to be repulsed by it. "He was huger than life. Dean worshipped him. I know that he's got all these outsized ideas about how you'll be, because of how he was with Dad." 

Alec can't guess what these _ideas_ are, except that he's pretty sure he won't like them. He waits in silence rather than prod the conversation forward.

"Not everybody gets along with their dad all the time," says Sam, and the smile slides off his face. "I hope you can be patient with Dean."

"Patient," says Alec, neutral. He has no idea what Sam is talking about. "Okay."

An ironic little shake of the head. Sam has guessed that Alec is out of his depth here. "Anyway. Family. What can I tell you about your family?" He is so eager and earnest. This is the guy that killed children on command? Alec controls the impulse to touch the pocket where he hid the picture of the little girls.

"Uh, you were talking about Rose." 

Sam's eyes go far away. "Rose is awesome. She taught me how to grow a garden and how to skin a rabbit and how to talk to the neighbors. She's practical and gorgeous and the world almost ending didn't even faze her." Looking at Sam right now is like looking at that picture, the other Polaroid, of the dark woman with the intense expression. Obviously the feeling is mutual. "Meeting her was like the end of a really long convalescence."

Alec doesn't know what that means.

"I was in really bad shape, right after the Pulse. Dean was in bad shape too, I mean, we'd both taken such a beating, and --" Sam bites his tongue right before getting to the important parts. "But he's good at that, at just setting aside his own hurt and taking care of business. I didn't even know he'd broken his fingers till they'd already set crooked."

"God," gawks Alec, playing his part. "What happened?"

The sharp angles of Sam's face tighten. He's got lines around his eyes, like Dean does, but they don't look like smile lines. They look like somebody who spends all his time thinking, and isn't going to be fooled by a guy who never did get any advanced training in field interrogations.

"I made some really big mistakes," says Sam, slow. His shoulders are high and his gigantic forehead with a pulsing vein in the middle of it. He slits his eyes and glances at Alec a few times, and then away, at his feet. "Huge ones. I thought I could take care of myself and I ended up burning myself out."

Controlling his breathing, Alec tries to play it cool, or at least clueless. He takes a sip of his coffee and tries to think of the right thing to say to move this confession along. That Sam _is_ confessing is a good sign, right? It's a sign he's sorry for whatever he used to do.

Sam puts down his cup on a ledge on the wall behind him: a bricked-over window, just the windowsill left over. He puts his hand to his throat like a protective gesture, and then he hooks those long fingers in the stretched-out collar of his t-shirt and pulls down. So by burnt out, he means literally.

It used to be a tattoo on his chest, on the left side just above his heart, but now it's a blurry blue blob of scar tissue, permanently pink and rippled in the middle. Hard to tell what the original shape was: the Manticore Club seal of approval, maybe. Like a barcode on your neck, except you signed up for it voluntarily. Alec ducks his head and kicks at the gravel at their feet.

"Looks like it hurt," he says.

Sam lets go his collar. He makes a face, at himself or at Alec's stating the obvious or maybe at the world. "Rose thinks I should tattoo over it, turn it into a jellyfish or something." He shakes his head and he's out of it, he's chuckling to himself. "Like I said, practical."

Rose's idea sounds kind of neat: you walk into a tattoo parlor one day and you just color in over it, and move on. Maybe something simple, just a black box over it, or maybe some kind of complicated design, vines or thorns or a dragon's tail. Walk out with new ink and be a new person and leave that old person behind. Alec's hand comes up and he remembers in time and reaches for the Polaroid in his pocket instead.

It shimmies a little in the raw breeze between them. Alec holds it with two fingers and doesn't look at it. Sam isn't looking at it either: he's looking at Alec, or maybe not even, at something Alec reminds him of. Their fingers touch and the photo is with Sam again and his eyes scrunch up as he slides it back into his wallet.

"You look so much like your father," he says, with a little bit of a laugh. 

Alec can't do anything about that, so he says nothing.

"And you have no idea how it feels to be able to say that," Sam adds, radiant. "God, I wish we'd known about you earlier."

He has enough sense not to get all huggy or anything. Alec goes to sip his coffee and finds the cup is empty already. He crumples it and throws it behind him into the other trash.

"We'd have come got you, you know that, right?" There's something funny on Sam's face, like he thinks he's got Alec all figured out, like there's a secret they share. Some other secret, not the murdering-kids secret. Some secret of Alec's.

"I was all right," Alec protests, hollow, and changes the subject back. "Sounds like you were in bad shape, though. You didn't say what happened --"

Sam lowers his head and gets up close. It's almost a whisper: "Doesn't matter what happened to me, or to Dean. If we'd known about you, we would have protected you." He reaches out slow, unthreatening, and grasps Alec's wrist. His hands are workingman's hands, callused and cracked, rough like his voice. "That's what family means."

Alec sucks in a bitter lungful of air. He feels Sam's grip on his arm and wants to lean into it and knows that's a bad idea. Sam can obviously feel that tension in the muscles under his fingers.

"Someday I hope you'll believe that," he says, and lets go of Alec. "It's a lot to deal with all at once. I'm sorry it all turned out the way it did." Gently, with a physical standoffishness that Dean lacks entirely, Sam wraps an arm around Alec's back begins to steer them along the alley again. Trash snaps around their ankles as the wind picks up. Sam takes a breath. "I don't know what Dean's already said, but you don't have to be stoic about it. I mean, it's a big deal. It's a life-changer. It's okay to be all mixed up inside."

"I'm all right," says Alec. He is trying for stony and discovers that it comes out shy instead.

"You said that already," Sam reminds him, and Alec shuts his mouth. He lets himself be led away, wrapped in the comforting embrace of a retired killer, and says nothing at all.

Sam doesn't even notice, after all the effort he went to, that he's forgotten his coffee back on the ledge.

*

"Have a look at this glass," says Dean. Sam watches as he offers it to Alec.

The easiest place to do it is a blessed house, and it turns out there are hundreds of those in Seattle. Jo knew a good one, quiet neighborhood, not too broken-down. In the daylight, it looks like an ordinary house. Jo is observing father and son from the far wall, frowning but attentive. Beside her, Sam peels the green wallpaper in strips.

The glass glints in Alec's hand as he turns it to the afternoon sunlight. It's a simple thing, a rectangular mirror with rounded edges and no frame, small enough to hide in your fist and cover it completely. If Alec decides he can't look, he doesn't have to. Sam wants to say that out loud and doesn't.

"So that's a scrying glass," says Dean. "Scrying means seeing, and you can see in it things that don't show in plain sight. Go ahead and point it at the wall over there in the corner."

Alec is slow to do as he's told. Dean is too forward with him, too eager. He has that way of intentionally failing to notice the little signs of Alec's hesitation, as if enthusiasm can overcome everything. Finally Alec flexes his wrist and turns the glass towards the corner. Because it's such a small target, only he can see what he's pointing at. From where Sam is leaning all it reflects is a rainbow-edged blob of light on the ceiling.

"I don't --" Alec starts in, and then his whole body tightens up, ready, a stalking animal stance. His face is sickly though, nose wrinkled like there's a dead body in the room. 

There isn't. Sam has already had his turn with the glass, and has seen the blessing-marks on the blank wall: a Russian cross with stylized smudges of smoke on either side like bird's wings. Sam can peel wallpaper all day and not get down to the layer where those marks were applied, a hundred years ago or more. They're invisible to the naked eye, of course, and you'd have to spend a lot of time in the city archives to notice how crime in this neighborhood has always somehow managed not to occur at this specific address.

"What's that," asks Alec, and it comes out like an accusation. 

"That's EMF, an energy signature," Dean explains. "Where supernatural things have been, they leave traces behind. The glass is charmed to pick up that energy in a way that we can see."

"We used to use audio," says Sam. "Dean rebuilt a Walkman -- that's a portable radio -- to pick up EMF. But the glass is easier, and batteries are expensive."

Alec hitches out a nervous laugh. It's awkward in the room, too slow. "Supernatural?" he mumbles. 

Dean is sparking with excitement. If he could dance around the room and keep his dignity, he probably would. "You ever hear how somebody who's had his heart stopped can't keep a watch running afterwards? The reason is, the electrical field around the living human body gets disrupted, and it affects things like watch batteries, stuff that sits close to the body for long periods of time. This is the same idea, only moreso." 

He doesn't mention he's using himself as an example: you can't tell by looking that his watch is a wind-up model. But maybe that's something they'll have to reveal someday too. There's just so much to tell, and most of it painful.

Slowly, Alec realizes his father is waiting for his attention. Ten years ago, Dean would have snapped his fingers at him or boxed his ears, but he's turned lenient in his middle-age: he just stands there with that pitiless gaze and Alec turns to him like a sunflower. 

"What you're seeing in the glass is the energy left behind after, especially after something people think of as sacred. We can talk about ghosts later, but this here is just resonances left behind: the surface just catches an imprint and can't let it go, like when you rub your eyes too hard and you see purple patterns over everything for awhile."

Sam has been expecting a reaction to ghosts. Alec doesn't even blink, as if his mother is a topic bundled away somewhere on a high shelf. His eyes move cautiously over everything, to Sam and to the wall and to Dean and back to the mirror again. His poker face is much better than Dean's.

"It's a lot less dangerous than it used to be," Dean adds. Alec angles the mirror around the room and that pale spot of reflected light goes darting on the ceiling. Dean's voice gets louder, as if he's not sure he's got anyone's attention: "Used to be angels and demons, epic battle, full-on reality-destroying shit. That's over with now, maybe we'll tell you about it some other time. But these days, it's just nice, individual weirdness, monster here, mutant there, and every once in a long while something out of folklore like a fish everybody thought was extinct, a what-you-callem --"

"Coelecanth," Sam supplies, as they'd both known he would.

Jo shifts uncomfortably against the wall. Sam hasn't had the chance to ask her why she doesn't hunt any more. Maybe she doesn't have a reason. Sam watches his brother reach out a slow hand to Alec and touch his elbow. The square of light on the ceiling shivers in place.

"So that's what the Winchesters do: we save people, we hunt things." Dean lowers his voice. "Saved a lot of lives, over the years. Put down a lot of nasty things that were causing a lot of pain. And I gotta tell you kid, it's the most exciting adventure I ever went on, and I have been on a _lot_ of adventures."

"You guys really believe in ghosts?" Alec's voice is high and breathy. It sounds a little like sarcasm, but a little like fear too. Sam stands up and crosses the room.

"He's a freelance peacekeeper," he explains. "It's not as true now as it used to be, but there's a lot of people who see something weird and just pretend it isn't happening, even if it starts killing the neighbors. When the cops and the normal way of doing things weren't any help, that's when we showed up."

"Kinda like the A-Team." Dean beams. Alec clearly has no idea what the A-Team is. 

"You stopped though, right?" Alec turns to Sam, eyes bright. Now _that_ Sam recognizes: that stubborn chin, that way of stating a wish as if it were fact. It's like euphoria in his chest, that recognition. Alec adds, "You said you live in one place now."

"Yeah," Sam tells him. "I did it because I was raised to it, but I never loved it the way your dad does."

Something flits across Dean's face: old arguments maybe, or surprise that Sam would even bring it up. Suddenly it's important to say, and important that Dean doesn't get to leave this part out.

"Our dad raised us to it. He and Dean were partners for years." Dean's mouth is tight, irritated. The grief is never far away, even this many years later. But he thinks it isn't relevant, and it so is. Before he can object Sam blunders onward: "But you don't have to take up the family business to be part of the family."

"Sam," his brother grumbles.

"You don't have to say yes," says Sam, stubborn.

"No, you don't. But what you do have to do is know how the world works, and how to take care of yourself in case you get in hot water. Doesn't mean you have to seek it out." Dean makes an expansive gesture, gets himself back on comfortable ground. "I'm just saying, it never gets boring, the weird shit the world can turn out. Vampires, poltergeists, werewolves, ghosts too: you name it, I've killed it." 

"Vampires," repeats Alec, with dull incredulity.

"Well, not lately." Dean chuckles and it's an invitation to Alec, but Alec is still not on board. "Tell you what, though: last year I tangled with this critter in the foothills near the New Mexico border. Legends in this one valley going back twenty, thirty years, way before the Pulse. It was a hairy dude with panther eyes, or a panther that could walk upright and wear pants sometimes. It ate dogs and sometimes livestock and every few years a kid would disappear. One silver bullet to the heart, and those people can breathe easy now."

A smile fights its way onto Dean's face. Sam grimaces at him, and that's like old times too, so like that Sam stands upright, and looks around for a way to mark the difference. By his side, Jo is doing her Jo thing, that face that observes and gives nothing away.

"So that's what I do, man, all over Colorado and New Mexico and upper Texas and sometimes I have to slap heads over the Utah border too. Jo here is retired, but she's at least got some intel I can work with." She shrugs when he says her name, comes away from the wall. Dean goes on, "Cause Seattle is _infested_ with the unnatural, man, it is _all over_ and the sector checkpoints aren't exactly keeping it out. So I'm thinking, the city needs clearing out and it's way more than I can handle on my own, even with Jo's help, and Sam is way too out of practice. But if I had an assistant, some kid I could train up in the business so he knows his oats and can take care of his hometown, maybe we could get a handle on the monster population of Seattle and restore a little order."

They all pause and wait for Alec to respond. He's not even looking at the wall any more, that patch of reflected light on his own face. It casts his eyes into shadow and illuminates that sharp Winchester nose. Sam can't tell what Alec is seeing in the glass now, or if he even remembers it's for scrying. He looks -- deflated, as if they've said something disappointing. Which is a reaction even Sam was not expecting.

"You don't have to believe me," Dean says. "I can show you, just walk you through a basic hunt, let you see what you'd be up against. There's a critter in the sewers I got my eye on, some kind of mutant manimal scaring away the smugglers. It'll be a cakewalk, and you can be the third generation of Winchesters up against the dark side."

Sam clears his throat. "Maggie and Sarah don't know yet. Your cousins," he adds, and touches the pocket that holds his wallet. "They'd only have nightmares, and anyway I'm not going to let them learn violence this young. I didn't want you to know yet, either."

"He's not some child, Sam," snaps Dean. "Don't treat him like a child. He's old enough to make his own decisions."

He is not a child. Alec stands in the middle of the room with a frown on his face. Slow, Sam pushes off from the wall and comes up close, just to be here, just to mitigate Dean's goddamned enthusiasm. 

"Seeing is believing," says Dean, and claps a hand on Alec's shoulder. The shift of that shoulder is subtle, just a quick twist and Alec is out of his father's grip. That's good, Sam thinks. The most important thing is for Alec to decide for himself, and not be bowled over by expectation and outsized personality.

Alec puts on a smirk, not his best effort. The tension is in him for anyone to see. "I guess," he says, as if it didn't matter. "Lemme think about it."

"It'll be awesome," Dean tells him, another wish stated as fact. They are alike, they two.

"Awesome," mimics Alec, but his voice is emotionless.

*

"What your boy doing now?" Cindy demands, the instant Max walks in the door. She has a mud mask on, a hot pink one, and the bunny slippers to match that Max picked up for her last Easter. She does not look happy.

Max puts down the clean laundry. "I don't know, what's he doing now?"

"Hiding in your bedroom, is what." The mask cracks around Cindy's frown. She wraps her flannel shirt more tightly around her body. "Girl, I know you not planning on knocking with those boots. If he don't know that, he got to be told."

Oh, _that_ boy. In lieu of answering, Max picks up the laundry again. She slings the bag over her shoulder and shuffles to her doorway.

The room looks like always: bed, clothes, girly concoctions, the usual disarray. It looks like home and it looks like nobody's there. "Hey," she says, just to test the air.

"I don't like it," OC mutters, as she wanders back into the bathroom. Her slippers scuff gently on the floor. "I don't like it at all."

Max is not listening to Cindy. Alec hasn't answered her call. She can smell him in the room, and feel his body temperature affecting the air. She pinpoints him after a moment: he is on the far side of the dresser, wedged against the wall, tucked into a shadow. Max is so not up for any more drama. "Okay, what."

He doesn't answer while she stomps into the room and plops the clean laundry onto her bed. He just shifts his weight, compact and efficient. She upends the laundry bag and lets the clean clothing fall out in a pile, and sits down to sort and fold without saying another word. From her new angle, she can see him fuss with his hands, head down.

"You're gonna make me guess?" she asks at last.

When he does look up, his face is strange, still and intense and not-Alec. There is a brief, terrifying moment where Max misrecognizes him and thinks that Ben is alive and standing in her bedroom: that insane calm, his certainty like a poison cloud hiding the fear underneath. Max gets a firm grip on herself and on the pair of stripey socks in her hand, and returns to reality. Of course Ben is dead. Alec is the live one, and he's bratty and brash and has never managed to keep silent for this long in his life.

He doesn't make her guess after all. Cool, controlled, he cocks his head and asks, "Did you recognize him?"

The bitterness underlying the question washes over Max and she lets it flow away from her. "No, of course not. I never saw him till this week. Either of them."

The aloofness with which Alec accepts her answer makes it feel like a lie. Max has no idea where he is going with this conversation. 

"He knew," says Alec. "He knew when your unit escaped from Manticore. He didn't know what happened, but he knew the when. 'Just a little while before the Pulse,' he said."

Max puzzles over the timeline: she's pretty sure the Winchesters had federal warrants at least a couple years before she got out into the world. It doesn't make any sense, what Alec is saying. "He told you?"

"He doesn't tell me anything." Alec crosses his arms and leans against the dresser. There's almost a sneer on his face as he asks, "You never said why you ran just then. What _inspired_ you."

Her automatic reaction is to bristle, and she controls it carefully. She thinks through what telling the truth will mean while she folds a shirt, sleeves behind the body like children keeping secrets. "Seizures, couple of us. Me too." Surely Alec knows about the seizures, even if he's never had one. He's not that familiar with the idea of loyalty, though. "We knew what happened to the rejects, so we fled as a unit instead."

"Nobody told you to go?" he demands. "Nobody planted the idea? In charge, I mean."

The antagonism in that question inspires him to step out of the shadow, and Max can see the sweat at his temples. The skin is stretched too tight over his cheekbones, as if his insides have grown overnight. His lip curls up, and his teeth shine in the overhead lights. She can't help it, and snaps at him:

"We think for ourselves. Unlike some people."

It takes some of the fire out of him. He has to plan out what he says next. "He was sorry." Alec's voice is soft. "That I got sent to Psy Ops. I didn't tell him it was your fault."

There is nothing to say to that accusation, so Max says nothing. She is familiar enough with family to know when someone is spoiling for a fight. She pulls the pockets right-side out in a pair of cargo pants and smoothes them to neatness and mulls over that man's sense of responsibility. Another pair, and Alec begins to pace. 

"Why --" he starts, and that's when Max figures it out.

"Maybe it wasn't our fault. I mean, for the others, yeah, if we hadn't run the higher-ups wouldn't have freaked out. But for you, maybe it was _their_ fault. The Winchesters, whatever they did. That bank they robbed in Milwaukee, or something else that's buried in the records. Maybe that's why he's sorry."

"But how would he guess about Psy Ops?" asks Alec, hoarse. He has stopped pacing. "He still thinks I'm his kid. Obviously, or I'd be dead already."

"All he knows is Manticore would hurt a kid to get at a grownup." And saying it that way is squirmy, weird. It makes the Winchesters sound like allies. "He thinks you were an ordinary kid, on the outside. Don't you think Manticore would do something like that, to keep its people in line? Don't you think they'd go after somebody's family on the outside?"

The expression on Alec's face is haughty. "Don't I?" he says, deadpan. Max looks down. Brown sock goes with brown, and navy with navy. Right: Alec has been on those missions. He has been that weapon that attacks a kid to get at a grownup. There aren't many transgenics who know better than he does what Manticore will do.

"Anyway it doesn't matter," says Alec over his shoulder. "I'm going to have to kill him either way."

It's ridiculous to want to rub your face in hot clean laundry, to just lie in it on your bed and pretend that you don't have to solve anybody's problems. Max turns the hems of socks methodically. "Okay, what?" she asks.

"They are so much crazier than we thought," he says, up-pitch. If it's nonchalance he's going for, he's completely missed the mark.

"They are?"

"He's still doing it. Just last year. Silver bullet to the heart, he said." Alec points at his own chest. "You name it, he's killed it." His face is set, cheeks blooming with fever. 

"Alec," she mutters, into a t-shirt. Her hands make the warm clothes tidy on the bed, nice little piles.

He is not listening to her, lost in his own litany. He has not even looked in her direction. "They want me to hunt with them. They set it up already. They want me to hunt monsters with them."

Max snaps her fingers at him. "Alec. _Alec_. Just tell them no."

This gets his attention, finally. He flops down on the floor next to the bed. "He set it up already," he repeats. Alec rests his elbows on the covers and fusses at some bit of lint. He's been biting his nails again. "He found somebody. He was down in the sewers and he knows where to find one of us."

In the middle of that cold shock, Max discovers another: she has been sorting out her clean underwear right in front of Alec. He hasn't noticed yet, but still. It is something to focus on: she hides the pairs of panties under her folded trousers. "An X-5?" she asks, although she hadn't heard of any of them living in the sewers.

"Doubt it. Somebody ugly, somebody from the basement. I mean, it fits." Alec expells a heavy breath of frustration. He stares at her folded t-shirts without seeing them. 

"Do they know for sure?"

"I don't know." His head goes down, face into the bedspread. Max can see the black lines of his barcode on the back of his neck like an angular bruise.

She can't come up with a gentler way to ask: "So they're planning to kill this person?"

"No." It comes out dull, muffled. "They're planning to make me do it."

"Oh."

Max sorts and folds and puts down little neat piles all around Alec's head and arms. Those muscular arms, way more powerful than they look, thanks to an extra helping of fast-twitch muscle fibers and near-unbreakable bones. Dean Winchester is wimpy by comparison, just a human, just ordinary. Alec could probably kill him and Guy Smiley without breaking a sweat, without their ever knowing it was coming, just crack-crack and their necks broken from behind. She shudders away from the idea: it's not that bad yet. That's not the kind of thing you think of till it's that bad.

"There's got to be some other way," she insists.

"What?" Alec lifts his head. He looks up to her, with those needy, piercing eyes. It has never occurred to Max before how much he models his behavior on her example. Her friends are his friends; he works where she works; he has picked up her more-current lingo and her choice of bars and even her brand of beer. He wasn't a cat burglar, when they first met. He learned that from her too. He's always been good at camouflage, but taste in beer is way beyond camouflage.

"You can start by helping me fold these sheets," she tells him. She billows the clean fabric between them, dryer-smell and tiny flying lint-particles. His hair flaps on his forehead and he blinks, startled. Alec turns his hands over and gets a loose grasp on the edge of the sheet. He stands and stretches the cloth between wide arms. He brings his corners together and snaps them, military-precise.

Max doesn't know what to do. But she's not the one who got herself stuck in this situation, either. She sighs and takes Alec's corners from him and doubles over the corners again. "Well," she says at last. "I'll think of something."

*

All the tunnels look alike. Aging concrete on all sides, maybe some pipes overhead, when the storm drains and sewer lines overlap. If they're lucky, a grate in the ceiling for a little bit of light. If they're unlucky, puddles. Alec has done his time in tunnels like everybody out of Manticore: transit system, refuge, weirdly comforting reminder of the barracks at home. He's even killed someone in a tunnel before.

Dean and Max are standing side by side in front of him, looking forward into the gloom. He is cool, slit-eyed in his dislike, and she is openly poison-sweet. Each of them addresses Alec as if he were the only other person in earshot. Alec wants to tell them both to knock it off, and can't.

So Max wanted to tag along: Alec is grateful to spread the blame around, and Dean didn't say no. (Maybe he wanted to, but he didn't.) Her hair swishes, loose under her knitted black cap, and she stalks the sewer as if it were the hallway of a mansion with top-of-the-line security. She's even dressed like a thief, all in black up to the turtleneck covering her barcode, and Alec is too. Her idea. The only relief in all this is the absence of Sam. He's aboveground somewhere, too retired for sewer hijinks, and they'll be able to bring him the news of Dean's accidental death rather than kill him too.

Max and Dean gesture Alec forward and lay down dripping footfalls along the corridor. It's too narrow for them to go side by side, and Dean jostles her out of the way to go first. Of course he doesn't know he's the weakest of the group. Max glances back at Alec and does that thing again, where she shakes her head at him as if she thinks he's just going to snap and do it right now. Alec is not that dumb.

"How about through here?" Max asks, for about the tenth time. She is standing in the doorway to a side tunnel with her innocent face on. Dean doesn't even look this time, just says over his shoulder,

"I know the way." He advances without checking to see that they'll follow. Of course they have to follow. Alec's stomach churns, acid. If they can't get him lost then they'll have to be in arm's reach when the fighting starts. There isn't any other way.

Muscles tight, Alec steps over trash and newspapers. Dean has made a big deal about how they're clues, but the finer points are lost on Alec. Max has been playing it too hard, all attention and concern, and Dean knows something's up. His shoulders have begun to knot and climb. In the strobe of the flashlight as Max swings it around, his face is neutral. It's stiff. They're all stiff. Alec is starting to shake from it.

The passage they're in opens up into a cavern, standing water on the floor an inch deep. The murky brown water reflects light upward, queasy stripes over everything. The noise of their footsteps is ridiculous.

"Hey Max," says Dean suddenly. They're not quite to the middle of the room, and his voice echoes off the concrete in a cacophony. "You want to check out those side-passages for me?" With a heavy finger he points right and left. It's a ploy, it's obviously a ploy, but there's not much Max can do to disobey him without giving herself away. She doesn't say anything, just heads off to eyeball the doorways as told. She gives Alec a look as she goes.

Slaps and splashes of water crack high notes in Alec's ears, irritating. He stands next to Dean and does nothing and says nothing. He has got it under control. He is not making any stupid mistakes.

With a swish and a rustle of clothing Dean swings around and crowds right up in Alec's space. He's not angry or mean, just there, just in the way and unavoidable. His hot breath steams everywhere. This close, it's clear that Dean is a tiny bit shorter, less than half an inch, or maybe it's just his shoes. "Alec, if you don't want this -- " He doesn't finish his sentence. He lays a hand over the breast pocket of his coat in a meaningful way, and then he tries again with averted eyes. "We can quit, kid. Anytime you want. Just say the word."

Startled, Alec backs up a step. It takes him a full minute to realize that _quit_ means just now, just this one expedition, not hunting entirely. Dean will go out tomorrow and do it for real this time, and without Alec along to stop him. There's no hope after all.

Dean misinterprets that hesitation. "You don't have to prove anything, okay? It's not like that." He reaches out a hand, that squeeze on the shoulder that he seems to think will fix anything, and Alec backs up again, a visceral jerk. He is hot all over, skin crawling, and his stomach does backflips. He is sure that his face shows it.

His face must show it. Both their faces show everything, every flick of anger and horror and confusion. Dean leaves his hand hovering in midair, palm open, unthreatening. His mouth turns up at the corner, that way he has, and he's going to say something _nice_. Alec tightens his throat against it, but Dean doesn't get the chance.

Behind him, heavy churn and spatter as something struggles in the water. Something big, something alive and desperate. Alec can see it over Dean's shoulder, can see the side of Dean's face as he drops all emotion and spins at the ready. Max pops her head back in from the passage she's been hiding in, and the three of them watch as a tall fuzzy body leaps out of one corridor into another, legs lifted for maximum forward motion. The arms catch on the dry land of the far-right corridor, click-click of claws, and then the hindquarters follow and it's gone, tail wafting behind.

Alec watches it go with neutral surprise. It shocks him back to reality when Dean takes off after, shouting. The water splashes high, droplets on his back up to the shoulders. He has his hand inside his coat, the way you do when you're pulling a weapon.

He disappears down the corridor before Alec can dart forward. A sudden tussle at the entrance, a stiff arm from Max -- Max, Alec has forgotten all about Max -- and they follow, fast and wordless, boots echoing on the dry concrete. The wet footprints are easy to follow, even if Dean were not still shouting. Alec's knuckles are tight and hot, like his throat. This is it.

Down the passageway, duck under a row of pipes, light ahead: daylight. Max has a grip on Alec's elbow as they emerge into another cavernous room, this one dry, grates high in the ceiling. Instead of mud, the room's full of leaves and sticks and plastic trash. Trapped in the corner, a pile of stained clothing that moves and trembles.

Dean stands at a safe distance, arms stiff in front of him. His gun gleams in the light, like silver, like his teeth as he grins. He is ready to kill. "Okay kids," he says, panting from his run. "Let's see what we got."

Fingernails dig into Alec's elbow. Max steers him to a position near Dean, but outside of arm's reach. She clicks the flashlight back on with her free hand, and gives them all a look.

The clothing is a down coat, big and puffy and red, with torn seams and matted white feathers spilling from the edges. The hands that hold it up have gray backs and black palms, small and delicate, with long nails on the fingers. The face above those hands isn't exactly standard human issue: long nose, receding chin. Ears higher than the usual, stuck out far enough they seem likely to swivel. Pale cheeks and forehead shading to black around the eyes, like a mask; thick shock of unbrushed tawny-gray hair. The eyes glow orange until Max lowers the flashlight. 

Manticore, obviously. Somebody from the basement levels, one of the program's dirty little secrets. "Hey," says Max, in her friendly voice.

"Don't go near it," Dean warns, and that's how Alec realizes he's going near it. Max hasn't let go his elbow, so where she goes he follows. Dean is dancing to one side, searching for a clear shot. Max and Alec are in his way. He won't shoot the people he thinks are human, of course.

"Hey, sorry about the scare," says Max. She hands Alec the flashlight and reaches out. "My name's Max. We won't hurt you."

Dean makes a frustrated noise. He is all the way on the far side of the room. His arms are lowered, weapon pointed at the ground. He hasn't put the gun away, though. 

Max's hand rests on the gray forearm of the person they've cornered. The short, dark hairs tremble under her touch. "You got a name?" she asks.

There's a little snuffling noise and then, "Rocky." Her voice is high, tentative. 

"Rocky Raccoon?" says Dean, and shakes his head. "Seriously?"

Nobody else in that dim chamber gets the joke. Rocky lowers the coat in front of her a little bit, sticks her head out to sniff. She's wearing a sweatshirt and boxer shorts over her fur, bushy ringed tail tucked down her right leg. Her posture isn't really humanoid -- her back looks a lot more flexible than the standard issue -- but her shape is. It's obvious she hasn't been able to scrounge a bra. She catches Alec looking and brings the puffy coat back up. He looks away, at the only other thing to look at in the room, at Dean. 

His lips are pursed, brows lowered. He looks certain, merciless. He doesn't move his attention away from Rocky at all, not for a second. Claws dig into Alec's gut.

"How long you been down here?" Max asks. She is holding Rocky's hand, easy as you please. "Just a little while, right?"

"Beats sleeping in dumpsters," says Rocky, morose. She shifts and picks up a ratty backpack. It's zippered closed over a jumble of funny-shaped objects, probably all her worldly goods. "I'll move on."

"Where to?" says Max.

"Whoa whoa whoa," Dean calls. His voice reverberates around the space. "Can we spend a few seconds on finding out where Thumper here comes from? Cause last I checked, those things shouldn't be able to talk."

" _You're_ a thumper," says Rocky under her breath.

Dean guffaws. His face is ironic. His arms are still straight, pointing downward, gun at the ready. Alec promises himself that the second that gun moves up is when he'll do it, just step forward and disarm him and break his neck, all in one action. It will be easy. He promises himself. He won't feel a thing.

"Cavemen shouldn't be able to talk either," Max retorts. "And yet your mouth keeps moving."

"Cute." Dean loosens up a little, limbers his arms. He glances at Max and then away, as if she doesn't matter. He settles a hard, penetrating gaze on on Alec. He says, "Sometimes the things that look helpless are the most dangerous. You can't just assume."

Max is nothing if not persistent. "Yeah, you're a freaking menace."

Behind her red coat, Rocky slings her backpack onto both shoulders. She cocks her head at Max's combative posture. "Can I go now?" she asks.

"No you cannot go now," growls Dean. He's tightened up, annoyed, but at the same time he lets go the gun with one hand. He's trained himself not to fire in anger. "How bout you explain how an overgrown rat can talk and wear clothes. I am not playing any games with you."

" _Games_ ," says Max. It is an ugly word in her mouth. "She is just trying to get by!"

Dean shakes his head, sardonic. "Yeah, that's what they all say, right before they put the whammy on you."

They face off like gunslingers, only with personality instead of actual weapons. Max is braced half in front of Rocky like a protector, shoulders back. The claws in Alec's middle dig in grimly and start to climb, constricting his lungs. He can feel them, little hot knives, animal's claws. He is hyperventilating badly enough to get light-headed, and can't stop.

Max curls her lip. "So what, as long as she's a good girl and does everything you say, she won't get executed just for existing?"

"Look, girly." Dean breathes out through his nose. He's slow, caution or confusion or just plain irritation. "I don't know where your friend comes from, and I don't know what her story is, but we have chased down some shit you would not even believe. I know what I'm doing here."

Of course he knows. He worked for Manticore; he knows exactly what Rocky is, and exactly what he's supposed to do to her. The only thing he doesn't know is that he's outnumbered in this little room. Alec can feel it in his windpipe, that clawing sensation, painful like a deep breath on a bitterly cold day.

Max spits: "Oh, so you're not an executioner except that you totally _are_. The freaks, the weirdoes --"

"The ones that are crooks and murderers, yeah --"

(It's in Alec's throat now, it's almost out. He can't stop it.)

"Maybe they're crooks because they can't make ends meet any other way!"

"Yeah? Maybe they're murderers because they get off on other people's hurt."

"You don't even know --"

It's like the difference between queasiness and the involuntary convulsions of throwing up. The tension disappears and it's automatic, eager, something he couldn't stop if he tried. Alec cries out, "Why would they know, Max? Why would he know?" 

He can hear his own voice: it is too loud, too shaky. Max whips around towards him.

Dean's face shows everything. His free hand is over his pocket again, like laying a hand over his heart. His tenderness is unbearable. "Hey, it's okay --"

"No, it's not." Alec glances over at Rocky. Even she doesn't know. She still thinks Max is just some do-gooder, not kin. She will be as surprised as Dean. Alec closes his eyes against the way that face -- his face -- will lose its awkward affection and harden into murder. It's the end now, and Alec should always have seen it coming. 

Before he can speak Max babbles over him. "No, it's true, there's no reason they would know." The words freeze Alec. He stands there agape and Max grabs his hand. She turns to Dean and gives him her Serious Face. "Listen, you've probably heard the rumors, and, and, they're mostly true. There was this hospital south of the city, some kind of veterans hospital, and there was a fire and they closed it down and all the veterans ended up on the street."

She gestures at Rocky. Dean does not fail to notice that Alec is still shaking. 

Max goes on, "So, uh, you've heard about the kind of stuff they pull on soldiers, right? That hospital was for the ones that never recovered. And this fine upstanding American right here got the shaft from the government she fought to protect." Max pinches the back of Alec's hand, hard. It's something for him to focus on as he struggles to keep his mouth shut. Rocky plays along and stands up a little straighter, at parade rest. There is no way such a crappy, improvised lie will work.

Alec can smell his own sweat, thick in the space. He sways a little on his feet. Dean is ignoring Max's explanation, his full attention on Alec.

"You can ask anybody. It was a bunch of hazardous chemicals, there's a whole neighborhood that's too poisoned to live in even now. Rocky here," Max adds, and she's dancing on the edge of parody, "she's been homeless for what, for months now and do you know how hard it is to get Veterans' Affairs to do anything?"

Alex is supposed to do something. He is supposed to say something and he can't think of what. He thinks so hard about it he doesn't notice that Dean has circled around to his side. For once he keeps his hands to himself, just brushes his shoulder against Alec's. It's that unexpected touch that pushes the words out of Alec's mouth: "S-1-W," he says. "We work for the S-1-W. Community activists."

Dean Winchester has obviously never heard of the S-1-W. His forehead wrinkles up as he works on his next question. "So you what, you catch and release the raccoon population in the city? Little tags on their ears or something?"

"She served her country," Max insists. "Doesn't she deserve to be treated better than this? There were riots at the VA Center last summer. It got on TV and everything."

"Oh," remembers Alec, as if it were a memory from another life. "Logan was there, right?" 

"Yeah," says Max, and smiles. It's not clear if she's happy to be reminded of her swoony boyfriend or relieved that Alec has pulled himself back from the brink.

Dean's right hand still holds that shiny silvered gun. He makes a series of gestures with his left hand, military-sign. It's a little bit different from what Alec learned in battle school, a lot looser and with whole unfamiliar phrases peppered in. Dean is not looking at Alec. His bright eyes shoot a challenge to Rocky where she stands against the wall.

When they made Rocky, they gave her the full allotment of tactical intelligence. She signs back, crisp, textbook-perfect. Her small black palms are silky in the dim light. She queries one of the unfamiliar phrases and Dean cracks a grin for the first time on this little adventure. "Okay, you got me. My kid brother and me made that one up when I was ten. It means is Dad looking and can we steal quarters out of the ashtray."

Rocky thins her lips, shows her canid teeth. It is a very slim imitation of a smile.

"So can you quit it with the threats now?" Max asks, impatient.

Dean's gaze takes in every twitch and hesitation of Alec's. He is standing too close, as if he expects Alec to collapse and wants to be ready to catch him. "You'll vouch for her?" he asks, low.

"I swear," says Alec, hoarse. He stands very still. The way Dean has asked the question, it's not even necessary to lie and risk that it will show on his face. He feels Dean's breath on his neck, like a sigh, like a sign of life.

Resigned black eyes in a furry face. "Are you going to kill me, or can I go now?" asks Rocky. 

"I swear," Alec says again. His voice is shaky and low, almost a whisper. The S makes an echoing hiss in the dry cavern.

Rocky pulls a hood out of the sleeve of her ragged red coat. It is standard-issue gray, of course, more remnants of her Manticore clothing. She ties it on snugly, so that it hides her ears.

Max has one eye on Alec and one eye on Dean and still she can spare some attention for Rocky. "You got a place to go?" she asks, gentle. She stuffs her hands into her pocket and comes up with a couple of crumpled dollars, three twoonies and a quarter. "We at least owe you lunch, for the scare we gave you."

"They say Terminal City's a good place for freaks." Rocky's nails click on the coins as she plucks them out of Max's open hand. She sniffs and hitches up the straps of her backpack. "I'll go there, I guess."

She backs out of the corner and towards an exit, hands out and placating. Dean, by Alec's side, doesn't try to stop her. She comes to the entrance to the corridor, and with transgenic speed she whips around and flees. Her toenails click on the concrete, echoing, as she goes.

"Be safe," Max calls after her.

Dean shakes his head. "Now I've seen everything," he mumbles to himself, and puts a hand on the back of Alec's head, flat as if testing for a bruise. The gun is gone, put away at some point and Alec didn't even notice. They jostle together, Alec clumsy and Dean absorbing his clumsiness. 

They don't say anything else. Alec feels the callused thumb above the collar of his turtleneck, above his tattoo, small soothing gestures. They move together, and it's like they were designed for it. They _are_ designed for it. Their bodies are alike. Their sweat is the same in that close, dank space and it doesn't matter that one is fear-sweat and the other the sweat of exertion. They're both alive for a little while longer. 

He is surprised when they arrive at the grate where they'd entered the tunnels: Dean lets go, and Alec's neck is cold. He looks up at the ladder into day, still shaking, his eyes like sandpaper and his throat painfully tight. Max is behind him. She can't see him like this.

Dean can't see him like this. He has to get away. That's what a good soldier does, when he's vulnerable: escape, evade, go to ground. Alec climbs the ladder.


	5. Free Radicals

By the time Dean gets his head above ground, Alec is halfway down the alley.

He's walking away, head down, hands in his pockets and his shoulders thrust up around his ears. He doesn't look back, not once, though the girl Max is standing there with a wounded look on her face. She doesn't even react as Dean clambers the rest of the way up the ladder and gets his feet back onto firm ground. "What the hell?" he asks her.

She ignores him. She's twisting her hands together like a little kid. Dean pushes past her and takes a step to follow Alec and she puts one of those hands on his arm, like she's got the right, like she's got the ability to stop him. Dean is about to say something unforgivable when Sam turns the corner at the other end of the alley.

A coffee cup in his hand, of course. He registers Alec coming towards him with a little smile and then that smile turns worried. The back of Alec's head doesn't change at all. Maybe he doesn't even see his own kin. Sam takes a big breath and his mouth is open and he doesn't say anything.

"Hey!" Dean calls. Sam doesn't look his way. Sam stands there like a traffic light and lets Alec walk right by him. He's close enough to touch, close enough their sleeves probably brush together, and Sam does nothing but frown.

The boy keeps walking. He doesn't look back. Sam watches him go for a minute and then turns away, back toward Dean and the girl Max who's still standing there holding Dean back with her big dark eyes heavy. He shrugs her off.

"Don't just stand there, girl: go after him!" 

Max doesn't go after him. She brings her hand back up to put it on Dean's arm again. He takes a step, not even really a threat, he wouldn't hit a pretty girl (he thinks), and Sam comes looming up. He doesn't look once at Max, or at the alley behind him. He's all eyes on Dean.

"Dude, no." He puts out both hands into his brother's chest. Dean can feel the warm coffee cup through his jacket, and the steam curls up to his face. "Dude," Sam says again, "no."

"What the hell," Dean asks again, helpless. He would beg, but he won't do it in front of the girl.

Max is shy now she doesn't have Alec at her side. Her all-black clothes look a little ridiculous in daylight, like a Hell's Angel in mourning. It wasn't so obvious underground. Wonder Woman on a bike forces a polite smile and hoiks a thumb over her shoulder. "So. I gotta blaze," she says, and Dean has no idea what that means.

"No you don't," he tells her. "You gotta tell me what just happened."

"I don't know," she says, sarcastic, "I think you traumatized the hell out of him."

"Why didn't he say anything?" Dean protests. "He could have said something before we got down there."

Max's dark brown hair hangs down her back and swishes against her clothes like an agitated tail. "He didn't think you'd believe him," she says.

"I don't," Dean shoots back. "How stupid do you think I am?"

She gives him a mean little smile and he can't help it, he gives it right back to her with interest. Max presses her strong lips together and gives Dean her good looks and doesn't say a word to him. This is pretty much the second when Dean realizes she is Alec's age and thus technically young enough to be his daughter.

He kind of knew that before, just looking at her, but it's right up in his face now, all nimble muscle and her knees like rubber bands.

Sam clears his throat, in case they'd forgotten he's standing there. "So he's not comfortable with hunting?"

"No," say Max as she whips around. Because now she's got somebody else to argue with, and that seems to be her default state. "He thinks it's gross and horrible and he doesn't want anything to do with it."

"Okay," says Sam, as if that's all. Now Dean's the one seething. He half-steps around Sam to go chase down the kid after all, and Sam steps with him and won't let him leave.

"You didn't see him," he appeals to Sam. The weapon he's been planning to give the boy is still in his jacket, warm next to his heart. Dean says, "He's not some delicate flower."

"Would it be so bad, if he were?" Okay, and now Sam is taking _Max's_ side. He sips his coffee like he's at some kind of college class, and Dean just shakes his head and turns away. Sam says to his back: "You pretty much set out deliberately to scare him."

"Nuh-uh."

It's been a long time since Sam's managed to get his brother all the way to _nuh-uh_. They don't fight like they used to, because they're older or because they're not living out of each other's pockets any more. The things they don't agree on haven't changed over the years, so the same arguments over and over are comforting and a little boring, like following a familiar road home. Dean glances over at Max, who has a funny look on her face. She's also about three paces down the alley, half-gone and not quite able to go. Buttinsky.

"You sounded nuts, dude. Kill kill kill, is that really all hunting is about to you?"

Dean snorts. "Thank you, Arlo Guthrie."

"I'm just saying, you couldn't have made it about the people we've rescued? You came at it all wrong."

"Yeah? When's the last time _you_ had to give that talk?" And Dean realizes how mean it is to say just before he says it: "You didn't even tell Rose. You made me do it."

But Sam doesn't react to that. He's got his hands wrapped around that coffee cup and his head down. Someday he _will_ tell somebody, and he'll make a mess of it, apocalypse-remorse and everything, and start a riot. They both know it's better for Dean to always be the one who does the telling. 

They'll have to tell Alec someday, and _there's_ a conversation the kid will want to run away from. Dean lifts his head and there's Max still standing there, listenining on every word. There's something on her face, some kind of confusion, that wasn't there a minute ago. She doesn't even notice she's been caught.

"You find him for me, girl." He points a finger at her. "You know where he hides, right? You go find him and tell him --"

Sam interrupts. "Dean, if you just listened --"

"Tell him --" Dean works his mouth trying to come up with the right thing Alec should be told. But he gets a look at Max and maybe he doesn't have to come up with the right thing. Her mouth turns down and her eyes go big and wobbly like a cartoon character that's about to cry. And of all things he expected out of her, this isn't it. Dean ends up at: "You tell him, girl."

The kind of world Max and Alec grew up in, it's not just hunters' kids that learned stuff the hard way. Her clothes are worn, gray at the seams, bootlaces frayed and re-knotted. She sets her stubborn jaw and Dean swallows down the terrible fact that he likes her, hell, that he respects her, and that maybe she's the one he should have recruited as his apprentice.

"I don't take orders from you," says Max, as if she's read his mind. But he can read hers now, and can tell she's going to follow this one. She straightens herself up like she's got a cape she can swoop around her, and turns to go for real this time.

Dean watches the back of her head, how she doesn't look back even when she obviously wants to. Beside him, Sam sips at his coffee. "Maybe you should just give him some space."

There are a bunch of nasty things Dean could say right now, most of them about Stanford. Clearly he's getting older, because he doesn't say a one of them. When he turns away, back down the alley in the opposite direction that Max took, Sam follows at his elbow without the need to argue over it.

*

Max doesn't dare wait more than a few hours before starting back into the sewers. Just enough to check in with Asha, make sure she'll back their story about the S-1-W in case anybody asks. Just enough to leave five messages on Alec's voicemail. He hasn't answered, and probably won't till he quits sulking or till he completely loses his head and goes to confess all to the Ax Murderers Winchester.

With a groan that echoes off the concrete around her, Max realizes just how plausible a scenario that sounds: Alec's hangups are not to be underestimated. She trots onward to the next ladder through the gloom, and lets herself back up onto the night street. The pavement is shiny-slick, but for now the air is just an icy fog rather than full-on rain. She's not too far from Joshua's house. As Max heads out in that direction, she pulls her cell phone to start in on damage control.

"Original Cindy, the one and only," comes that warm voice out of the speaker.

"Hey," says Max. "It's me. Have you seen Alec?"

"He ain't in your bedroom sniffing your underwear drawer, if that's what you mean." Cindy makes a noise of disgust. "What'd he do this time?"

"Long story. He's not answering his phone and he might be doing something really stupid. Can you check Crash and... I don't know," Max falters. She stares into the dull fog, how it billows between the houses and hides the trash in the yards. "Anywhere else he would go to freak out."

"Girl, you talking like I spend my precious time cultivating his attention." The pause on the other end of the line is cautious, shy. "He like the high spots like you? You gonna make me climb all those stairs up the Space Needle just to see if he's there?"

"No, he's avoiding me." Max is sure of that at least. "He ditched me right in front of that guy you met, that guy with Alec's face only older. Can you talk to Logan and see if he can find out where that guy is staying? Alec might be there."

"Winchester you mean?" Cindy's voice firms: guessed what's going on, or enough of it to know it's serious. "I can talk to Logan. What if I find him?"

"Call me. And, like, the biggest, killingest bruisers you can think of. We gotta scare him off, get him out of Seattle." Max turns the corner and she's on Joshua's block.

The low chuckle in her ear pretty much summarizes Cindy's thoughts on being best friends with a mutant super-soldier. "I'll think of something," she is saying, but Max isn't listening any more.

There are two important things on the block. One is a slim shadow high on Joshua's roof, like a weathervane in the cold still air. He is all in black, as he was last time she saw him hours ago. If it were not so foggy, he would be invisible against the night sky.

The other important thing is Joshua himself, or somebody just as large and hairy, crouched over the square grate in the street. "Joshua, hey," Max calls, the phone still at her ear. "Cindy, uh, forget about that other thing."

"He standing right there and all your worry for nothing?" OC can roll her eyes so you can hear them over cellular channels: it's a true fact.

"I gotta go," says Max, and hangs up. Joshua stands up over the grate with his nose in the air. Max walks closer down the block and resolutely does not look up at the roof. She says, "You find something in the street, big fella?"

"Hey little fella," snuffles Joshua. It is his idea of a stealthy voice. "Saw something down in the sewer." He nods downward, into the square hole in the pavement. It is unlit below, just darkness in the night. Joshua's long hair shines with droplets of fog. She looks him over. He doesn't go underground any more, not since last time, not since all the times before. He can afford to be above ground, so he is. But he's still eyeing that grate even so.

"Pretty cold out. You want to come inside?"

"Big heavy red coat," Joshua says. "She was down there."

Max shakes herself. Well of course she would have headed this way. It's on the shortest route to Terminal City. "You saw Rocky? Uh, did she say hi?"

Joshua frowns. "She ran. Freak scared of a freak."

"She's scared of a lot of people," says Max, weary. She scratches at that spot behind Joshua's ear that he likes so much, and girds herself for another fun concrete adventure. "With pretty good reason."

"Pretty eyes," he says to himself. Max crouches to touch the steel grate: clammy like a melting ice cube. She really is going to spend her night coaxing a wild creature out of her lair. Joshua interrupts this little reverie: "How long is Alec gonna stay on the roof?"

Max turns her face up to him. Joshua's back is to his steep front steps. Behind him, the porch, the overhang, the peak above the second story: shingles and gutters and the cinderblock chimney. The shadow on the roof doesn't move.

"As long as it takes him to learn to come in out of the rain," Max tells him. "I gotta go find Rocky."

"I could make him some cocoa," suggests Joshua, shyly. "I have instant."

The night is young yet. Max sits on the curb and dangles her feet into the grate. "Don't wait up for him." With a shove and a grunt, she hops down, back into the sewer and onto Rocky's trail.

It doesn't really take long, in the end. She might have run from Joshua, but Rocky clearly has Max's scent, and is waiting patiently at a junction just outside the barriers that mark off Terminal City. She's taken off the hood and her gray-brown hair stands out behind her ears. She is filing her little black nails with a piece of sandpaper wrapped around a block of wood, obviously filched from a construction site somewhere.

Max gives her a little shy smile as she steps out of the damp darkness. "Hi," she says. "I guess you're wondering why I stood up for you."

Ears twitching, Rocky flares her black nostrils and gives Max a skeptical examination. She is sitting on her backpack, still zippered closed. It's a wonder what she must have stolen and salvaged and made for herself out of the city's trash. She runs her fresh nails through her hair, smoothes down one eyebrow and then the other. Her nostrils are quivering in the still, cold air.

"Not really," says Rocky. Her lip curls, vaguely contemptuous. "You think I don't know my own kind?"

Blushing, Max stuffs her hands into her pockets. "Oh. Right. Yeah, um --"

That toothy smile again, that she made at old man Winchester. It's a bitter thing. "Even you pretty ones, you're not too hard to recognize."

"Guess not," Max tells her. "Anyway, I'm sorry about... that whole thing. Alec had his head up his ass, and --"

"If you and your brother hadn't been there, the older one would have shot me, right?"

He would have, most likely. Or captured her for further study. So for once Alec's crappy life choices have done somebody some good. "He's not actually my brother."

"If you say so." Rocky shrugs. "Closer kin than me."

Max grumbles, "Not really," and pulls her hands out of her pockets. "You want help carrying your stuff?"

*

Nights are quieter at home: the comforting noises of nature and sometimes a train whistle far away. In the city, the nights are just dimmer, more dangerous extensions of day. Jo seems totally unfazed: this is her city and most of her business happens at night. Sam on the other hand is exhausted and hyperalert at the same time.

"He just walked away," Sam says again, just to say something. "Dean called after him but Alec was so not hearing it."

It's cold, just shy of ice. Jo leads the way, not too hurried but not dawdling. The humid air curls his hair and feels like marshwater in his throat. Fog billows between buildings and Jo says nothing. She nods her head left, and they cross the street. Sam isn't sure whether they're heading someplace specific or just avoiding the cluster of people standing over a trash barrel fire. 

"Dean's never walked away from a problem?" asks Jo, ironic. 

He gives it the chuckle it deserves. "Sure. But when he's doing that he actually wants you to reach out and stop him. Alec, I think he'd just fight his way out."

"I don't mean to say 'I told you so' but --" Jo begins.

"Yeah, I told him so too." They gaze at each other, a little uncomfortable, but also a little intimate. Sam is as surprised as anybody that he can think of himself as friendly with Jo, all these years later. She shrugs it off after a moment, businesslike.

"So he's S-1-W," says Jo, wary. That's probably a bad sign. "I wouldn't have said he was the type."

Sam privately thinks that it's about as likely as Dean joining the Benevolent Order of Elks. "That girl, Max, she and Alec seemed close. Maybe he's lying to cover for her."

"Maybe. Most of their stuff has been political theatre, kind of Mickey Mouse. The only reason I've even heard of them is Eyes Only took up a couple of their causes last year." She sees some glimmer of skepticism on Sam's face, and shakes her head. "Yeah, I know. Pirate television is so 1999. But sometimes it matters. A lot."

Sam stops in his tracks so that she'll have to turn and face him. Jo is slow to do it, weirdly vulnerable, prepared for argument.

"I guess I've never thought of you as a crusader," Sam tells her, and hopes that she understands it's a compliment.

She smiles a little, just for a few seconds. Then she's off down the block again, her breath streaming behind her. Sam keeps pace with her, and waits for her to say more.

"This fucking city." She is angry, but not in an immediate way. It's something that bothers her but that has become normal. She opens her mouth a couple of times before she gives up caution and says it outright: "Yeah, I've worked for him too. Refugees, mostly. A couple of faked identities. It was at a couple layers remove, so no, I don't know who he is either."

They walk. The night closes in on them, fog obscuring their sightlines. Alec is somewhere in this fucking city, and nobody seems to know where. Sam really hopes that he's the one to find him, not Dean.

"I've seen that tattoo before," says Jo. She doesn't break stride or glance aside to be sure that Sam is there. It's like she's telling the fog, or telling herself something she's reluctant to know. 

"He said he'd been in a steelhead gang," Sam says, a little weak. He knows it's a lie, Dean knows it's a lie.

"You ever see that on an actual steelhead? Cause I haven't."

Obviously, it's something bad. Just as obviously, Jo has held off telling till after she's back on better footing with Sam, till a moment when Dean can't possibly eavesdrop because he's on the other side of town. Tired, Sam wracks his brains what could possibly going on with a kid's ugly gothy tattoo. A kid's ugly gothy barcode tattoo, like a library call number, like the thing you used to scan at the grocery store to find out how much something cost. An idea wallops him in the head.

"Oh shit. Oh Jesus." Sam has to stop and bend over, hands on his knees. "Are you talking about child trafficking?"

"What? No." She stands on the sidewalk and waits for him to regain his breath. "I -- probably not."

It's the scenario that makes the most sense. Kids with no family to look out for them, kids from small towns all over the mountain west, kids with no prospects brought into the city and sold as servants. Sam struggles to comprehend it. "He said something that first night, Alec did. He just -- he sounded so cynical."

He can stand up again after a little while, lungs raw. 

"Look, it's not --" Jo says, and pauses. Sam turns to her and she is waiting, patient. She looks him in the eye for the first time since they got on this topic. "I don't know what he is. I just think he's more than he's telling you."

"I don't know what that means."

"Yeah, me neither."

She glares at the street and the ramshackle houses all closed up and darkened for the night, respectable houses. 

"Could be anything, I don't even know." She starts them walking again. "It _could_ be some kind of gang thing, or a cult, or the second coming of the Teen Titans. There was a conspiracy theory going around this past summer that there were mind-controlled government agents infiltrating the city for a coordinated program of assassinations." She throws up her hands in mock-frustration. It is obvious she's looking for a shift in topic.

Sam is very tired. "Whatever it is, he's not ready to talk about it. Uh. I guess I know the feeling on that one." Jo slows on the sidewalk: they've arrived. Alec may be nearby, still freaking out, and all the superhero powers (or weird government conspiracies) in the world can't help him through that. "Anyway, mind-controlled assassins? Are these the same federales that after eleven years still haven't consistently brought Manning, Colorado back onto the power grid?"

"Yeah, well, like I said: conspiracy theory. They go around, around here. And here we are," says Jo in a low voice. 

She gestures towards the end of the block. It's not a bad-looking house, about average for the neighborhood. The foundation is cinderblock, and the siding in dire need of a paint job. It's a steep set of stairs to the wide porch, narrow spindle-rails all around. It's the kind of porch you'd set a chair out on, and say hello to evening friends, the kind of porch off which you'd sweep the leaves in the morning and greet the kids on their way to school. There are bars on the windows, and over the front door. The leaves aren't swept.

"Who lives here?" Sam asks, but Jo shakes her head.

"Windows are painted over. He comes here at least once a week, sometimes with groceries. Always leaves in a good mood." They are whispering, their breath like clouds. Sam isn't sure who started it. 

He looks up. The porch light is on, but the first and second story windows are dark. Well, it's closer to dawn than dusk. There aren't many lights on in the whole neighborhood. Balanced carefully on the porch railing, in silhouette under the bulb, a tall narrow cylinder: a closed thermos like an exclamation mark. The eye automatically follows that line upward, and finds another silhouette on the roof.

It's Alec, of course. In the dim starlight, he is ill-defined, just a shadow really, hunched over keeping his pain to himself, obviously a trait he inherited from his father. He might be leaning asleep on the spalled chimney; he might not have noticed yet that he has an audience. No, of course he's noticed. Sam crosses the street to approach the front steps and Jo, wary, follows with him. She keeps her hands in her pockets: disinclined to intervene.

She says, low, "I thought it was visiting a friend, you know, somebody with leprosy or an anxiety disorder, but maybe it's the S-1-W clubhouse." She shrugs. For all they know, it's a central clearinghouse for refugees.

It's possible if they stand here long enough Alec will get tired of it and come down out of his snit. But whatever else he is, Alec's still a Winchester, and will stay up there stubborn till he falls off the roof. It's too cold to be out without a hat and mittens; if Alec isn't feeling it Sam definitely is. Finally he comes to a decision and climbs the house's front steps.

It's forward, a little intimidating. In the country, you don't help yourself to your neighbor's porch without a lot of notice or a lot of affection for having a shotgun pointed at you. The house stays dark and silent, unoccupied or full of terrified fugitives or just packed with good citizens, sleeping the sleep of the just. They make no objection as Sam steps onto the porch, his shadow puddling at his feet. He touches the thermos on the railing. It is is cool to the touch. He opens up the top and discovers it's cocoa inside, still hot. Cap back on, screwed down tightly and the cup overtop, Sam tucks the thermos into his jacket and eyes the support beam that holds up the porch roof.

Sam looks back down the stairs at Jo. She is standing on the sidewalk, hands in pockets. Behind her the street gleams with frost, the sewer grate a dull square glint next to the curb. "Call Dean for me, will you?" He says, low. His voice seems monstrously loud in the night. Well, at least it's fair warning to Alec. "Don't tell him where we are."

He doesn't wait to see whether she does it or shrugs it off or calls in the cavalry. Thermos against his ribs, Sam feels for hand-holds in the cinderblock porch supports. If one person can climb to the roof, it can't be that hard for another, right? He digs in a toe, and starts to lever himself up. 

The railing makes a good foothold, but there isn't a gutter on the porch roof to grasp. The concrete blocks are roughing up his hands as he scrabbles, and he makes no progress. Somehow this kind of physical audacity used to make sense, when he was 22 and Dean had already gone clambering up, over, in. Sam heaves himself upward and gains an elbow on the porch roof, then both elbows. His back begins to hurt. One knee up, and a bitten-off curse as his jeans catch on an upraised nail and tear. The burn of the cut alongside his kneecap, and Sam wonders when last he had a tetanus shot. 

He is two-thirds on the porch roof, struggling for a foothold, when a light voice comes down to him, "Aren't you kind of old to be climbing roofs?" Sam has practice at startlement, and does not let go but pauses, a little guilty, where he is. A quick thump, and Alec's feet bounce into view. He crouches in front of Sam. He sounds amused. "What are you doing?"

"Looking for you," says Sam, and reaches out for a hand up. Alec gives him a tug, and in a moment Sam is on his back on the shingles, sweaty and blowing. "That used to be easier."

"What made you think I'd be up here?" asks Alex, still with that antic tone to his voice, but tight too. Whatever's in the house, he doesn't want it to be found out.

Sam sits upright. "I keep my eyes on the sky," he says at last. "You're hard to miss."

Alec gives a sarcastic snort.

The thermos is still hard against his ribs, warming from skin-touch. "Oh, and whoever it is lives here left something for you." Sam pulls the thermos out and hands it to Alec. The boy holds it, numb. "It's still hot, I checked," says Sam.

It's only then that Alec unscrews the top to investigate. He sniffs the steam as it escapes. "Cocoa?"

"Guess you've got a friend," says Sam. 

Alec doesn't answer, but busies himself by pouring out a capful of cocoa, and hands it to Sam. Fingers on the hot metal, Sam can feel the rawness in his palms from his climbing attempt. He sips at the hot liquid. 

"That's not a bad thing, having friends. People who've got your back, come hell or high water." Sam pats the shingles next to him, inviting Alec to sit. He won't sit close, though, and ends up on one knee out of arm's reach. Sam decides not to notice that distance, just holds out the thermos cap as if they're side by side and sharing a drink. Slow, alert, Alec leans forward and takes it.

He's remarkably able to keep things to himself. Alec sips at the cocoa absently, more to have something to do than thirst, and doesn't respond. Sam opens his mouth to explain about Dean, and Dad, and hunting, and everything. And then he closes his mouth again.

He would like to tell about how one of the last things Dad said before he died was that he'd wanted Dean to have a home, and how Dean is over forty and still on the road more often than not. It is brimming in Sam's head, how frustrating Dean can be, his impenetrable loyalty that seems like a demand, when you're young and trying to make your own decisions, but that looks a lot smaller and needier when you're not as vulnerable any more. There's a lot he could tell Alec. All of it is about Sam, and about Sam's perspective on Dean, and none of it is about Alec. He says nothing.

So they just sit there on the roof side by side, the thermos cup passed back and forth between them without a word. They drink down the cocoa till it's all gone and Alec has lost the look of a kid waiting for the next blow to fall. Down on the street the fog is retreating, maybe because it's getting colder. Sam rubs his hands on his thighs and watches the graying horizon. With great difficulty he holds his tongue in case Alec wants to talk.

"You said it's okay to tell him no," says Alec at last. He tells it to the sky, a plume of mist leaving his mouth.

"Yes. Absolutely."

That doesn't break the ice as Sam had hoped it would. The silence begins again, Alec's mouth on the move as he works through some private logic. It's not hard, as part of the campaign not to freeze his ass off, for Sam to move a little closer in case it's something that needs to be whispered.

It doesn't. "But he'll keep on hunting himself, won't he?" He says it out loud, louder than necessary. He says it like an accusation. The look on Alec's face is not different from the look he had the first time he saw his father: the same grim tightening around the mouth, the same helpless dullness in his averted eyes.

"You could ask him to quit." Sam risks it, and puts a hand on Alec's arm. He isn't shrugged off, which is a start. "If you asked him to, he might."

"I _can't_."

The desperation in that voice. There's no way of knowing what the kid has survived already. Sam covers Alec's hand with his own. "Someday, then. When you can."

Alec doesn't say anything to that, but he takes his uncle's affection, and doesn't push it away. 

"He seems like a rigid man, but he isn't really. He'll fold the minute you stand up to him."

"What, like a lawn chair?" Alec reclaims his hand from Sam's grip and chuckles. It's reassuring to see him like that, and a little disappointing too. Sam knows how to play along.

"Like a concertina," he slanders his brother, shameless. "Like a paper fan. Like somebody who just wants you to be happy."

Agile, Alec stands and paces the shingles, unafraid of the height or the edge. He finds the nail Sam tore his jeans on, bends it down with his bare hand. He has not shivered once, though his ears are pinking in the cold. He's obviously not ready to acknowledge the meat of what Sam is saying.

"You want to try and climb down? I don't think you can make it yourself."

That deflective little smile, like his father's.

"You'll let me down easy, right?" asks Sam.

"I'm always easy," says the boy, and extends his hand to help.

*

It's too soon, really. They've only been here eight days, and that's nothing in the life of a twenty-year-old kid. But Dean's had an eye on Sam this whole time, and he's flagging. The city wears him down. He's not sleeping well. It's time.

So they're in the train yard again, dawdling before the all-aboard call goes out. Dean's been talking for the past hour, all advice and funny stories like they won't get the chance again for a long time. Alec just kind of listens and nods absently, which is better than sulking, but the idea of leaving him alone in this shithouse city -- 

Dean slings his duffel bag down into the cinders at his feet and turns to face the boy. "Trains run twice weekly," he points out. "I can be up whenever you need me. Faster, if I steal a car."

The kid shrugs his shoulders, like he doesn't really think Dean would do that, which is pretty much a big blinky sign of how much Alec's got to learn. 

Sam is actually talking to Jo, without that usual rabbitty look on his face, so it's a fact that miracles do happen. Dean reaches out and maneuvers his son in the other direction for a minute of privacy.

"Listen, Sam's birthday's in May." he explains. Alec wrinkles up his eyebrows and ducks his chin. "I head up to the cabin with a gas can, we take the old lady for a spin like old times. The Impala," he adds.

"The car," Alec tells his feet.

"The _bitchin_ car. You should come. Meet your aunt, play with the kids, do all that healthy nature crap, and then take a ride in the sweetest machine ever made in the U. S. of A." Dean reaches out and joshes him on the arm, tough-guy stuff, no mush. "It'll be great."

Alec has his hands in the pockets of his jean jacket and the collar flipped up. It exaggerates how hunched up his shoulders are. "Great," he mumbles.

"Stay as long as you want. Bring your buddy Max, if you want." Dean joshes him again. "That's the thing about family, it's like having a motel room you never have to pay for."

"I heard that," says Sam. Now he's on his way home, he already looks better. Less tense, little smile curling up around the lines on his mouth. Alec turns to him, automatic, like they're made from the same kind of parts. He shines those needy flashlights he calls eyes up at Sam's big shape, direct the way he isn't with Dean. Emo runs in the family like dimples, and just happens to skip certain generations. 

Dean tries to keep it light. He flicks a three-pack of condoms at Alec's head, and is pleased to see the kid catch them without a flinch. "And hey, let's make sure I'm not a grandfather any time soon, okay? Max thinks I'm an old man, but I'm definitely not old enough for grandkids." Alec glances at the package without surprise -- so at least he knows what they're _for_ \-- and pockets it.

At their feet they've got their duffel bags, full of stuff now, mostly stuff that's impossible to get inland, and that'll keep for the rest of the winter. Dried fruit, canned vegetables, some flower-smelly soap for Rose. Refined white sugar, woolly socks, honest-to-god blue jeans. A couple of wooden toys for the girls, small enough for hiding in pockets. There's too much stuff between them for Sam to carry it all back to Manning himself, so Dean is going there too apparently.

Jo has her hands in her pockets and a cat-like look on her face. She pulls out one hand, and it's a fistful of shiny ribbons in red and green and blue. "I know what little girls like," she tells Sam, and hands them over. He takes them like they're gold, which they sort of are. He and Jo get a nice long look at each other, and maybe all isn't forgiven but at least they're over it. Dean is grinning when she turns to him.

Her other hand pops out. "Wear a hat, you idiot." She tosses a red wool cap at Dean, hits him in the face with it. She tells him, "You'll catch your death someday."

It makes Alec laugh, and that's enough reason for Dean to shut his yap about it. Jo shoots the kid a serious glance and holds his gaze like she's making sure she's okay. With her in town, Dean feels a little better about leaving his son behind in a big, scary city.

There's a pause before Sam opens his mouth and reaches into his jacket. He falters for a second, just long enough for Dean to guess what's next. Sam says, "So, I want you have these," and hands Alec two squares of paper.

The pictures from his wallet, of course. Maggie and Sarah and two dumb little kids from the 1990s. It's the least they can give Alec. Dean realizes suddenly that he is never going to give that boy the revolver from Jo. He probably wouldn't know what to do with it anyway.

The pictures tremble a little in Alec's grip and he studies them all serious. "It's all the way down to Grand Junction to have pictures developed," he says, and makes to hand them back. Sam just shakes his head, and the longer he does it the more he opens up that smile into something big. 

"We can always take more pictures." He wraps an arm around Alec, not so much a guy can't squirm free if he wants to. Alec stands still and takes it, but he doesn't go looking for more. He tucks the photos into an inside pocket and heaves in a deep breath and Sam lets him go.

Dean Winchester has never looked that fragile in his life. It would totally crush Alec's ego to get mixed up in some kind of group hug nonsense, so Dean just reaches out to josh him again. "Anything you need, kid." It's a joke, but not a joke too. The pinch of that familiar mouth, the hard planes of his stiff cheeks -- Dean's crooked knuckles tickle through the boy's longish hair and he drags Alec to him. He tucks a roll of cash into a gaping jacket pocket. "Anything, kid."

Alec doesn't complain, doesn't make any noise at all, even when Dean pulls him down to be kissed on the forehead. It's an embarrassing thing to do, and Dean regrets doing it -- well, regrets doing it in front of everybody -- as soon as it's done. That look on the boy's face though, that lonesome unhopeful look, yeah, Dean would kiss a lot of foreheads to make that better.

"Get a haircut," he tells Alec, and then it's time to go.

*

It's slow to start, hauling that much freight. Watch the engine start up and it's like watching the first few seconds of an arm-wrestling match: all that energy spent on no movement. Alec turns before the first car starts to roll. He's got places to be, stuff to do, money to make. He kicks the shards of a broken bottle ahead of him through the dust and cinders, hands in pockets.

He gets halfway across the freight yard before he realizes he's assessing the nearby buildings for sightlines. There's a pretty good one, four stories tall with a flat roof, and Alec's feet detour in that direction without his telling them to. It feels good to climb, cold air in his throat and the churn of his knees as his boots clang off the exterior steel stairs. It feels good to get up high, and look back down on the rail lines and the cars strung together and the one four-engine train just starting to move now, heading south. The connections between cars come tight and groan, one at a time, and each persuades the next to start up and move, on down the line. From where he is, crouched on the black tar edge of the roof, Alec can't tell which cars have people in them and which have fish or strawberries or whatever it is people ship inland. All the boxcars look alike, and the only difference is how many people are sitting on top, hanging onto handles or hinges or dusty ridges in the car's design. All their worldly goods strapped to their backs, probably no ID checks if they're leaving, out of Seattle and on to some other city, some place that isn't as crazy and dangerous and paranoid.

Sparks strike at the wheels, dull friction of steel on steel. The train cars advance south and east along the track. The yard and the train itself are so long that Alec can watch it move for another hour at least. Around his knees, old mashed cigarette butts: maybe the teamsters come up here all the time to watch their work come and go. Maybe they wave good-bye to the strawberries.

Alec shakes himself and makes to stand. It's as he's tightening his knees that he realizes he's not alone, that somebody's managed to sneak up on him, up here, where you don't exactly just wander along. He turns with an unpleasant glee: maybe it'll be a fight, maybe a bad one, and maybe he'll get to throw somebody off the roof and watch them fall four stories to the cinders below. Maybe that will make this day suck less.

But he turns and it's only Max, Max and a dim shadow behind her, the both of them paused mid-stalk. The expression on Max's face is hilarious. Alec barks out a laugh and the person behind her turns just the right amount and the yellowing soda-lights from down in the yard reflect bright off a pair of eyes. Of course. It's Rocky the Raccoon. Who else would it be, come to play and make nice and be forgiven for existing.

He turns back to the train yard. "She told you?" Alec asks, over his shoulder.

"No," answers Rocky, a hard little yip. "I figured it out all by myself."

There are a million mean things Alec could say, and probably only half of them would get him slapped with those formidable black fingernails. He watches the train go and decides not to say anything at all.

Max glances between them, like she'll have to separate them if they start fighting. She's always got the bigger picture in mind. She's so responsible it's sickening sometimes. "Did they say if they'd be back?"

"Of course they're coming back." Alec sneers: "They _love_ me."

"Did they say when?"

"No. I don't know. Spring, maybe, and maybe just Dean. Sam has a house and farm animals and some random shit like that." Alec pauses. He's not sure what it means to him, so he says it neutrally: "I've got cousins."

Max gives him a funny look.

"The one with your face," says Rocky, "he gonna keep hunting us down?"

"I don't know." Alec shrugs his knotty shoulders. "Maybe you should ask him, Max. He _likes_ you."

She makes a face. Alec hasn't told her what Sam said on the roof. Maybe there's nothing to tell. Maybe someday.

He stuffs his hands in his pockets, tense. In the left, the roll of cash Dean was oh-so-subtle about handing off. In the right he finds a matchbook. It takes him a minute to place it: Strip City Deluxe, and the phone number Dean scrawled on the inside the night they first met, back at Crash, back when it was all just some bizarre joke.

"If they do come back, you can still play them," says Max. It's up-pitch, like she's trying for the consolation prize. "It's nice to have allies in a pinch."

"What are the odds," says Alec, sore, "that any pinch we get into won't involve Manticore?"

Max has nothing to say to that. Alec looks one more time at the matchbook between his fingers. Strip City Deluxe, and a phone number on the inside cover. He can throw it away, burn it, give it to someone who cares: doesn't matter. He won't be able to make himself forget the number. A photographic memory sucks sometimes.

"Whatever," he mumbles, and turns away. He's got places to be, games to play. He tosses the matchbook over his shoulder. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Max snap out a hand and catch it.

He stops. Butter would not melt in her mouth. She pockets the matchbook and adjusts her satchel. Alec starts up again, quick strides to get away.

"Don't follow me," he warns. Rocky bares her teeth, a hiss in her throat.

Max smiles at him, confident, cool. "I don't follow, smart aleck. I lead." And she darts off, hair trailing behind. She is at the stairs before he's had the chance to blink.

Rocky's hiss turns into a chirpy little laugh. "Show-off," she says, under her breath. She nods at Alec and heads out.

*

They are several hours out of Seattle, headed south and east. The mountains are thick with snow, looming ahead of them and guarding the way on their left-hand side. They'll make the crossing in the night, and be at a warmer altitude by morning. Sam can feel the direction of home like a beacon in the dark.

"I told him to come down in the spring," says Dean, offhand. He is staring out the little window in their compartment, arms on the ledge and his chin on his hands. Under his eyes, the pine trees on the downslope flash by. "Told him about the car, the trip we take on your birthday. I figure he'd want in on that."

"Yeah," says Sam. "He should meet Rose and the girls. Maybe stay a while, if he wants."

Dean exhales through his nose, half-chuckle and half-frustration. Sam gives him a look: his strong profile in the window, the late sun on his freckled skin. He squints into the distance, lips pressed together disapprovingly. It's rare to catch him so glum, nowadays when there isn't an apocalypse to worry about. It's rare that Sam has ever had the opportunity to try to josh him out of such a mood.

"Hey, did you want to make a stop in Salt Lake?" he asks. "While they're switching tracks we could visit the genealogical research archive. They've still got everything, even after what the Pulse did."

"What, man, homework?" Dean kicks away from the window and goes to sit on one of the crates.

"Dean. They'll have records. They are _awesome_ about birth and death records. We might be able to track down Wendy from Montana, find out what happened. We don't even know Alec's birthday, and I'm not sure he does either. It's possible he doesn't even know as much about her as you do. Don't you want to be able to give that to him?"

Dean is giving him a peculiar look, the kind of look he gives when he remembers that Sam does not literally share his brain, and vice versa. "Didn't I ever do that with you?" he asks.

"Do what."

"The Wendy's game. I didn't do that with you?" Sam makes a face and Dean turns away, ashamed. "Guess not," he tells the pine trees.

"What about the Wendy's game, then? What's it got to do with Alec?"

Dean sits there thinking for a couple of minutes before he opens his mouth. "Dad and me, when we were on the road. You know how he got sometimes. Right after you left, we were working together, bunch of cases in a row."

Sam stands quiet, one hand on the windowsill, and does not interrupt.

"I got on his nerves so bad. Finally he up and yelled at me, told me to go find a girl or something and get out of his hair. We had that fight in a Wendy's parking lot and he threw a cheeseburger at me and I walked away so I wouldn't take a swing at him. And after that when he wanted me to leave him alone he'd ask, 'Don't you have a hot date with Wendy tonight?' And I'd go off and find something else to do for a couple days before I tried to call him."

Like daybreak, Sam gets a glimmer of understanding and then it flows over him suddenly, piercing. "There's no Wendy from Montana?"

"I have no idea," says Dean, and laughs. It's not quite a bitter laugh, but it's not a happy one either.

Sam thinks this over for a long quiet moment. "Alec knew it was a lie."

"Course he did," says Dean. He shrugs, head down. "He doesn't want to talk about her. I gave him an out and he took it, end of story."

"But --"

"Leave it, Sam, will you? Just give the kid a break."

Sam is unsatisfied, of course. How can you not want to know your own son's birthday? He examines his brother's weathered face, the worry lines around his mouth. There's plenty they don't know, and the only person with the right to tell is Alec. Anyway, without a mother's full name, location, or timeframe, it'll be impossible to find a birth record. There will be no layover in Salt Lake City.

Dean shakes his head a little. "He wants to tell me he was born in a pumpkin patch, or out of a big glass jar in an X-Files experiment, or that his mom was the Queen of Fairyland, I'll nod my head and call him prince."

Sam cracks up. Leave it to Dean Winchester to be seduced by a fairy queen. And then the laugh peters out and he stares at the distant snowcaps on the mountains. Fairyland sounds a lot nicer than most of the scenarios Sam can think of.

"I mean," says Dean into the silence, "what the hell else does he have? I'm not gonna take that away from him."

"No," says Sam. "I get it. Maybe if you told him that --"

"Aw, he knows."

"Maybe," says Sam, slow, "if you told him that anyway."

"Yeah," says Dean, and waves a hand, noncommittal. "Maybe."

They ride the rest of the afternoon in silence.


End file.
